ABSTRACT
In 2011 the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) was described by Tony Haywood, former Chief Executive of BP, as ‘arguably…the last big onshore “easy” oil province available for exploration by private companies anywhere in the world, the last easy frontier’ (Wearden 2011). Indeed, it is not just oil that is found in abundance in Kurdistan. Vast pockets of gas are now known to lie under the foothills of the Zagros mountains. This chapter examines the role that hydrocarbon resources have played in the Kurds’ struggle for an independent state in the era of the contemporary Middle East state system. This system dates from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, the formative correspondence and subsequent treaties (notably Hussein-McMahon, Sykes-Picot, Balfour Declaration, Sèvres, Lausanne) and the resulting League of Nations French and British mandates for Syria and Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. From the ashes of the Ottoman Empire a Kurdish state was almost kindled as anticipated by the Treaty of Severe (1920). However, subsequent Turkish military victories under Atatürk and other developments poured cold water on this prospect. There was no mention of a Kurdish state in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) which officially ended the conflict between Turkey and the British and French empires and accorded recognition to Turkey within its current boundaries. Instead of a Kurdish state, the former Ottoman vilayet of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul were cobbled together in a new League of Nations-endorsed mandate in which Shi’a Arabs, Sunni Arabs, Kurds as well as a mosaic of other ethnic groups and religions were ruled by a British-imposed monarchy, in the Kingdom of Iraq. Under the Treaty of Lausanne, Kurds were distributed in the successor states to the Ottoman Empire as a geographically concentrated minority (that is, they formed a majority in the areas they inhabited) in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria (see Natali 2005). In 2016, the one-hundredth anniversary of the SykesPicot correspondence, these are still the same internationally recognised boundaries of these states as they were formed after the First World War.
