Desire for independent state resonates among Iraq’s Kurds

IRBIL, Iraq – Karzan Kanabi, whose clothing shop attracts young men with its cheap bell-bottom pants, never went to Baghdad, never learned Arabic and never felt the desire to go anywhere he would have to mix with Iraq’s Arab population.

“We want Kurdistan to be an independent country,” said Kanabi, 18, who had his Washington-brand jeans trucked in from Turkey, just to the north. He does no business with the rest of Iraq. “We only need Kurdi-stan.”

The nationalist sentiments voiced by Kanabi and many others in this prosperous Kurdish city 200 miles north of Baghdad have become the leading edge of a storm looming over Iraq. After 13 years of quasi-independence – the only regime Kanabi and his peers have known – the 4 million Kurds living under their own government here in the grassy plains and jagged mountains of historical Kurdistan have resolved never to relinquish the self-rule bestowed on them by the United States after the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

“Iraq is made up of two nationalities, Kurds and Arabs,” Massoud Barzani, one of the region’s two legendary leaders, said in an interview Thursday in nearby Salahuddin. “Kurds have no less a place than Arabs in Iraq.”

Kurdish determination, however, has run up against a resolve widely shared by Iraq’s new leadership and its backers, including the United States, to preserve a unified country even without the iron fist of former president Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. Iraq, they have pledged, is to be organized as a majority-rule democracy, which would redistribute power among its 25 million inhabitants – roughly 60 percent Shiite Arabs, 20 percent Sunni Arabs and 20 percent Kurds.