How the Kurds Defeated ISIS and Lost a Nation In the Same Week

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2017

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Kurds live in Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq but have no country to call their own. When they decided to create one for themselves inside Iraq, it didn’t go well.

After Iraq's Kurds held an independence referendum—which passed with more than 90 percent of the vote—Baghdad's armed forces moved fast. Its armies and allied Shi'ite militias took the city of Kirkuk and the surrounding oil fields. Within days, the Kurd’s economic engine was gone.

At the same time, Kurds in Syria captured Islamic State's capital, Raqqa. The United States, which has backed Kurds in both countries, had little to say about either event.

So what's really going on with this U.S. ally without a country?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast.
0:02.0	Support this show through the A-Cast supporter feature.
0:05.0	It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment.
0:09.0	Just click the link in the show description to support now.
0:19.0	The reality is that the war is not going to end here. And as we have just seen in Iraq, you know, the fractions and the
0:25.0	terminals will continue and I don't see any stabilization of the region
0:31.1	anytime soon and I actually foresee a new layer of war, a new wave of war
0:38.4	coming in both Iraq and Syria. Syria. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines.
0:56.5	Here are your hosts, Matthew Gullen. Jason Fields is lurking today.
1:17.0	The Middle East is complicated, and few regions are as complicated as Kurdistan. Between a recent referendum in the region that overwhelmingly voted for separation from Iraq,
1:26.8	the recent issuing of a arrest warrant for the Kurdish VP and Baghdad's troops
1:31.0	entering Kirk, things are decidedly more so.
1:34.1	Here to help us sort it all out this week are Benedetta Argentieri and Joey Lawrence.
1:38.8	Argentieri is an independent journalist who spend a lot of time in the region.
1:42.4	She was previously on our show talking about the women who fight ISIS.
1:46.0	Lawrence is a photojournalist who has also been in and out of Kurdistan.
1:50.0	Thank you both so much for joining us. So right up at the top you both know each other, correct?
1:56.4	Correct.
1:57.4	Yeah, Benny's my dear friend and she's got me out of trouble many times and she also happens to be a lot smarter than I am so we've gone on a few different
2:08.9	expeditions together in Syria and as well as Iraq slash Kurdistan depending on which day it was.
2:19.1	So let's get some basic stuff out of the way to put what we're going to talk about in context for the audience.
2:24.8	Where is Kurdistan geographically?
	...

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