ABSTRACT

The opening chapter of this volume notes that the Kurds of northern Iraq are an ancient people who live under the dominion of a majority Iraqi Arab population. With the formation of the Iraqi nation in the years following World War I, and the incorporation of Iraq’s Kurdish area into the borders of that new member of the world community, the Kurds saw their aspiration for an independent pan-Kurdish state frustrated, and thus commenced their decades-long struggle against the ruling elements in Baghdad to secure some form of autonomous or semi-autonomous status within the Iraqi nation. The adoption of the 2005 Iraqi Constitution brought full recognition of that effort with its acceptance of the KRG as the only currently designated regional governmental unit, and its vesting of that unit with the constitutional ability to control specified matters of exclusive authority, while sharing others with the central government in the nation’s capital city to the south.