 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
THE KURDS OF WESTERN ASIA: GEOPOLITICS TODAYOlga ZHIGALINA
Olga Zhigalina, D.Sc. (Hist.), senior research fellow at the Middle East Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies (Moscow, Russian Federation)
Kurdistan is an area of Western Asia densely populated by Kurds and renowned as a geopolitical “hotspot.” Its territory, which covers more than 500,000 sq. km and is inhabited by more than 40 million members of the Kurdish nation, according to their own statistics, borders on Iran, Turkey, Syria, and the Southern Caucasus which forms the gateway to Central Asia and Russia. However, the geopolitical significance of Iraqi Kurdistan is defined by several other factors: its wealth of raw material resources (primarily oil); the military-strategic value of its key location, which is conducive to gaining a dominant foothold in the Middle East; the importance of its transportation routes from West to East, and so on. Turkey, Iran, and Syria, which have large Kurdish enclaves, are showing a special interest in this area. In this respect, it not only continues to be an object, but also a subject of world politics and international relations in Western Asia. Nor can Russia with its 300,000 Kurdish population or the CIS countries, which have 1 million Kurds, fail to be indifferent to the tension in this region, where they have interstate and interregional interests.
By the beginning of the 21st century, Iraqi Kurdistan had become a highly developed ethnopolitical center (compared with the Iranian, Syrian, and Turkish constituents of this region). Its importance is also augmented by the fact that the activity of the Kurdish national movement in Iran and Turkey has perceptibly declined recently, and some Kurdish organizations from these two countries have moved their bases to Iraq.
This strategic geographical element is particularly important today with respect to the aggravation in American-Iraqi relations, which could draw various political forces into a large-scale war in the region. An important underlying motive in American policy in this part of……………
Please fill subscription form to obtain full text of this jounal
 |