The
currently stateless Kurds sit astride the Iraq-Syria border on land
blessed/cursed with oil, other resources, and geopolitical
significance. Is it any wonder that mega-corporations and their
client states are looking to use the Kurds, stoke conflict, and
exploit the situation?
by
Whitney Webb
Part
3 - Creating the divisions needed to justify partition
The
big problem for the partition plan, however, was the simple fact that
these diverse groups had coexisted with minimal sectarian violence in
Iraq for centuries. This meant, of course, that the sectarianism that
was needed to justify partition had to be engineered. The U.S., in
its invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, happily obliged,
sponsoring sectarian violence through the military training –
including torture techniques – it gave to Iraqi militias, police
and military forces that divided along particular ethnoreligious
lines.
Many
of these organizations have been found to be repeat human rights
offenders and have targeted particular ethnoreligious groups within
Iraq. Despite their egregious track record, the U.S. continues to
financially support these armed groups.
The
U.S. has also worked to create and strengthen ethnoreligious
divisions within the country by promoting Iraqi organizations founded
on religion or ethnicity rather than along political lines.
Though
some analysts believe that the biggest winners in the U.S.-created
environment of Iraqi sectarianism were the Iraqi majority population
of the Shi’a – which, after all, was given control of the
post-invasion government – it was really the Kurds who gained the
most as a result of the U.S.’ machinations to divide and conquer
Iraq.
The
Kurds are the largest group of nomadic people in the world and have
long existed without their own state. As journalist Sarah Abed has
noted, “This fact has allowed Western powers to use the
‘stateless’ plight of the Kurdish people as a tool to divide,
destabilize and conquer Iraq and Syria, where colonial oil and gas
interests run deep.” Although the most powerful Kurdish
political parties in these countries do not see themselves as pawns,
history shows that Western colonial powers have used them that way in
the past and continue to do so, often with their willing cooperation.
In
recent decades the U.S. government and military have openly supported
Kurdish separatist elements, though they have stopped short of
recognizing “Kurdistan” as a state completely independent of the
Baghdad-based government. This role fell instead to U.S.
corporations, such as ExxonMobil, a major force in the fossil fuel
industry. In 2011, ExxonMobil unilaterally brokered an oil deal with
the Kurdistan region, bypassing Iraq’s central government in the
process.
According
to ExxonMobil, the move was partly motivated by problems it was
having contracting with Iraq’s central government regarding
oilfields in southern Iraq. However, the promise of oil reserves in
Kurdistan said to be “one of the world’s most promising
regions for the future [of] hydrocarbon discovery,” was also a
clear motivator. As a result, ExxonMobil sided with the Kurdish
separatists over the central government, giving clout to Kurdish
goals of greater regional autonomy – and thus furthering their
shared goal of a divided Iraq.
Other
oil corporations – including Chevron and Gazprom, among others –
followed Exxon’s lead..
By
2014, more than 80 foreign energy corporations had struck deals with
Kurdistan. Oilman Ray Hunt, whose Hunt Oil Co. signed its own
unilateral agreement with Kurdistan in 2007, has consistently heaped
praises upon Kurdistan and has also made clear his vision for the
future of Iraq: “In the end, you’ll end up with a soft
partition of Iraq.”
Source,
links:
http://www.mintpressnews.com/geopolitics-corporate-profits-push-iraq-syria-towards-partition/230830/
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