Next month, Iraq’s Kurds head to the polls in an eagerly-awaited independence referendum. Ahead of the vote, on September 25th, the country’s Kurdistan Regional Government is searching for inspiration from abroad. Brexit, unsurprisingly, is an obvious pick; many Kurds are hoping that Kurdexit could – as with Britain’s shock departure from the EU – finally become a reality.
Yet for all the parallels between the two movements, the champions of Brexit are lukewarm in their support for the Kurdish cause. Boris Johnson said that Brexit was ‘about the right of the people of this country to settle their own destiny’. He was somewhat colder on the issue of Kurdish independence. In his role as Foreign Secretary, he said that the move towards Kurdish independence must be undertaken only with the Iraqi government’s consent. Boris went on to warn that ‘unilateral moves towards Kurdish independence would not be in the interests of the people of the Kurdistan Region, Iraq or of wider regional stability’.
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