Kurds ascendant

[Bob Of Burleson]

Kurdish Fighters Succeed Where Iraqi Army Fails

Peshmerga Retake Kirkuk After Government Forces Turn Tail

By Matt Bradley
and Ayla Albayrak
The Wall Street Journal

ERBIL, Iraq — Brig. Halgord Hikmat, the spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government's Peshmerga Ministry, made little effort to conceal his satisfaction on Friday.

"Yes," he said with a cheeky grin. "It is a very nice time to be Kurdish."

Only a few hours before, Kurdish soldiers known as Peshmerga were engaging Islamist insurgent fighters in Diyala Province, picking up the slack from hundreds of retreating Iraqi troops. On Thursday Peshmerga fighters moved decisively to occupy the nearby city of Kirkuk, easily expelling Islamist fighters who had sent Iraqi troops literally running for the hills.

The Iraqi government in Baghdad has suffered a string of humiliating military defeats this week as insurgents from the al Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham conquered several major cities.

But for Iraq's long put-upon Kurdish minority, the past week has offered perhaps the finest opportunity in a generation to assert the Kurds' long-delayed claims on disputed lands and eventually, said Brig. Hikmat, a fully independent Kurdish state.

By exposing the weakness of the Iraqi state and setting a precedent for other minority groups to announce their own self-rule, a Kurdish claim of independence could potentially do more damage to Iraqi unity than ISIS's sweeping assault of the past week—a fact that Brig. Hikmat readily acknowledged.

"This would be a further prelude for the division of Iraq," said Brig. Hikmat. "A united Iraq is not the solution at this moment. The creation of the Iraqi state in the last century doesn't have enough to it to keep Iraq as a united state."

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