Ready for an independent Kurdistan?

Masoud Barzani, the head of Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), seems ever more determined to hold a referendum on independence. 

While the entire region is being redesigned, the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) willingness to seize the opportunity is understandable. Turkey's response, however, will be critical, particularly as the prospects for the revival of the peace process with its own Kurds seem so dim and an ongoing insurgency threatens to spread across the country.

Since mid-2015, when Baghdad failed to pay the KRG a 17 percent share of the federal budget - prompting the KRG to export crude independently - Turkey has been the neighbor of a de facto independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq.

But a formal declaration of independence would be a giant step with ramifications for Iraq's territorial integrity as well as the future of the Kurdish movement in the region, including Turkey's Kurds. 

Henri J. Barkey, the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, asserts that Turkey makes a distinction between "bad Kurds" and "good Kurds," noting that Syria's Democratic Union Party (PYD), together with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), fall into the former as they present a threat to Turkey's integrity, whereas the KRG falls into the latter as a result of growing interdependence between Ankara and Arbil.

The fact that Turkey tried to insulate bilateral relations with the KRG from developments in Syria and an insurgency at home reflects such a duality in Turkey's approach to the region's Kurds.

Ayd?n Selcen Turkey's former consul general in Arbil, points at a  similar duality observed in Turkey's relations, not only favoring Arbil over Baghdad but also favoring Arbil...