ABSTRACT
Iraqi Kurdistan has been in the spotlight of late. In a February 2015 issue The Economist endorsed Kurdistan’s independence, arguing that a “country should be able to gain independence if it can stand on its own feet, has democratic credentials and respects its own minorities.” At the moment, Kurdistan exists as an effectively de facto state within a severely fractured and war-torn Iraq, a troubled state within a troubled region. The recent rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) helped reinvigorate the idea of Kurdish independence by drawing attention to the peril of state failure. This prompted Masoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdish regional government to say to the Kurdish Parliament last July: “The time has come to decide our fate, and we should not wait for other people to decide it for us” (Filkins 2014).
