Some eight years ago I did a six week long tour by random public transport through the Kurdish parts of Turkey. One evening in a Diyarbakir restaurant, a small non-tourist place in a mostly Kurdish city, I got into a discussion with some local guys about a potential state of Kurdistan.

They didn’t know English or German and I didn’t know Turkish or Kurdish. So we talked for some hours by gestures and scribbling on paper napkins. It was quite intense.

They argued for a Kurdish state, I argued against it. While I understand the Kurdish drive as a big ethnic group to become a state of their own, I do believe it would do more harm to them than it would do good.

Kurds are living in the south east of Turkey, in northern Syria, in north-west Iran and in north Iraq (the folks I talked to prefered a state including even more like within the pink border line in this map.)

If Kurds would form a state, all other states in the region would lose some ground and everything they have invested there – mostly on credits. Turkey has spend billions in building dams and water distribution systems in its south-east.

I scribbled a map and marked it with weighted arrows describing the feelings from/to outer countries to an assumed Kurdish state. In the end all arrows were pointing in. Kurdistan would be a piece of earth where none of the people living around it would have friendly feelings for it. It would be a permenantly attacked state without any trade route from its ground to the outer world.

The driving dream of a Kurdish state seed in northern Iraq including Kirkuk is to develop by oil exports to the world markets. But which harbour would Kurdish pipelines go to? Kurdistan is landlocked. Would Turkey, Syria, Iran or Iraq support Kurdish pipelines while under threat of secession?

Definitly not.

My alternative suggestion was a kind of early European Union alike to be formed in the northern Middle East (it took two napkin pages to explain that, but I’m sure they got it.) This without a formal Kurdish state, but with a significant Kurdish national role in the supranational environment such a union would formalize.

It doesn’t look like they took my amateur advise: Turkish-Kurdish Dispute Tests U.S. Strategic Alliances

The long dispute between Turkey and Iraq over renegade Kurdish fighters camped on the Iraqi side of their shared border reached new heights last month. When the head of Iraq’s Kurdish regional government threatened to provoke an uprising among Turkish Kurds, Turkey responded with warnings of direct military action and an angry complaint to Washington.

If the Kurds think they will get more support from the U.S. than some general senseless verbal growling against Turkey they are screwed again. The U.S. has neither any real interest in an independent Kurdistan, nor the means to guarantee it. Turkey and Iran can put down any Kurdish ambition by military means and they will not hesitate to do so if needed. Any such action would be very bloody.

I am in support of a ethnic Kurdish commonality – it’s a great historic culture and all Kurds I ever met are very good and kind people. I’m a regular at their Newroz parties here. But being a prosperous people doesn’t require a Kurdish state and the generations of violence that would follow its creation.