It was almost three years ago that Barham Salih, then prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), on seeing me for the first time after an unusually long interval, shouted from the distance, even before we greeted each other: “The Kurdish moment has arrived!”
His jubilant mood reflected the sentiments shared by most of the Kurds around the region. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring upheavals that started in North Africa, rapidly moved to the Levant and took a violent turn in Syria, the insurgent organization of the Kurds of Turkey had begun to issue calls to begin a “Kurdish Spring” by the year 2011. The KRG’s self-confidence was boosted by international oil magnates rushing in to explore and produce Kurdistani hydrocarbons, bringing with them not only the technological inputs but also the much-needed legitimacy for the quasi-independent Kurdish entity.
The Syrian Kurds had started to exercise self-rule in the three cantons, though lacking territorial continuity along the long Turkish-Syrian frontier. The one around the largest Syrian Kurdish town, Qamishli, was also at the proximity of the KRG, the other around Kobani at the midpoint of the 911-kilometer (566-mile) Turkish-Syrian border and the third around Afrin, which was also right across the Turkish border, a half-hour drive from the largest city of Syria, Aleppo, where nearly a half-million Kurds lived.
Since then, a new phenomenon was added to the map of the Middle East in the name of the Islamic State (IS), which declared itself a caliphate under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on June 29. Controlling large tracts of land in eastern Syria and the western and northwestern parts of Iraq, IS has become the neighbor of the KRG, having the longest frontier, nearly 1,000 kilometers (621 miles), which is judged as the line of confrontation. IS emerged as the main threat to Kurdish self-rule in Syria. The siege of Kobani compelled US President Barack Obama's administration to respond, forming an anti-IS coalition and pounding IS positions with US-led coalition aircraft. Kobani was hailed as the “Stalingrad of the Kurds,” adding an epic dimension to Kurdish nation-building that was accelerated on the ashes of the Arab Spring, which is no longer blossoming.
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