Both my parents are Iraqi Arabs from Baghdad. They escaped Iraq in the early 90s during Saddam's infamous Faith Campaign, where both my relatively leftist dad and my shia mother both fell under some prosecution. They left to Syria and then got resettled in the US thanks to a UN program. I speak fluent Arabic and meet up every year with my extended family in Jordan or Turkey, as both countries are relatively safe for Iraqis.
AMA about Iraqi politics, Iraqi society and the general cultural and political state of the Arab World. I will answer a few questions directly, but I'll keep the rest for late night today as I will go on a long ass drive in an hour.
What are your thoughts on the 2017 Kurdish independence referendum? Do you think that establishing a Kurdish state is a useful goal for communists?
That's a big question that I was hoping to see. The establishment of a Kurdish state in general is interesting, as the split in views between various Kurdish political actors is very underestimated in leftist circles. Syrian "Rojavan" Kurdish parties are mainly MLs and Anarchists, and they genuinely believe in some grand "communist/anarchist" project as basis for a Kurdish state. In Iraq it's completely different and much worse. The Iraqi Kurdistan government has basically run a huge neoliberal oligarchy since 1991, which has failed immensely in improving the lives of ordinary people unlike Rojava. It says a lot that the main backers of Iraqi Kurdistan referendum are Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as they want to establish a second Israel in the Middle East to further US interests and the neoliberal experiment. The two dominating Iraqi Kurdish political dynasties, the Barzanis and the Talabanis, have both made themselves very rich and bought a huge number of properties in the US and Europe, while regular Kurdish people only recieved their salaries for 3/12 months last year. In summary, I support the idea of Kurdish self-determination as long as it's driven through the Syrian Kurdish establishments. An Iraqi Kurdish-led project as outlined in 2017 would be horrible for the region and for communists in general, so hell no to that.