wsj.com | Ben Kesling
Reporter, The Wall Street Journal.

FALAH MUSTAFA BAKIR, THE HEAD OF FOREIGN RELATIONS FOR THE KURDISTAN REGIONAL GOVERNMENT, SAYS IN INTERVIEW, ‘WE FEEL WE ARE UNDER A HUGE THREAT’

WASHINGTON — The Iraqi Kurdish government has asked the U.S. to appoint a special envoy to mediate a deepening and potentially dangerous dispute between the central government in Baghdad and the semiautonomous Kurdish region, a top Kurdish official said Monday.

Falah Mustafa Bakir, the head of foreign relations for Iraqi Kurdistan, told The Wall Street Journal that he has approached U.S. officials with a request for the Americans to do more to address friction between Baghdad and the Kurdish government in Erbil. Iraqi military and Kurdish Peshmerga forces fought briefly [2] after the Kurds held a disputed independence referendum  [3] in September, and still threaten each other in places along the boundary snaking through northern Iraq.

“We feel we are under a huge threat,” Mr. Bakir said in an interview. “The international community has to engage. And engage today better than tomorrow.”

Mr. Bakir spoke while at the de facto Kurdish embassy, just blocks from the White House, while on a trip to the U.S. and Canada, undertaken in part to persuade the United Nations or the U.S. to provide on-the-ground diplomatic support for the region. He is scheduled to meet with national security adviser H.R. McMaster on Tuesday to discuss the matter, he said.

A representative of the Iraqi government declined to comment on the matter. The U.S. said it is weighing the Kurdish request.

“We acknowledge the request that was made by the Kurdish regional government and we are taking it into consideration,” a State Department official said, noting that the request was made first over the weekend.

In September, the Kurdish Regional Government, a semiautonomous enclave in northern Iraq, pushed ahead with the independence referendum, which was opposed by most of the international community, the government of Iraq and the U.S. Immediately after the vote, the Iraqi central government sent its military into disputed border territories and imposed a number of penalties on the Kurds.

“We believe we need to have more engagement from the United States” to help broker a permanent cease-fire between Iraqi military and Kurdish Peshmerga forces, Mr. Bakir said.

Since the nonbinding referendum vote, which was overwhelmingly approved, the Kurds have offered to suspend its results  [4] and return to the bargaining table with Baghdad. Longtime Kurdish President Masoud Barzani announced he would step down from office [5]. Now on the defensive, the Kurds are trying new approaches to stanch the erosion of their influence.

The Iraqi Supreme Court on Monday ruled the referendum vote unconstitutional, a finding the Kurds dispute, though they have said they won’t legally challenge it.

Mr. Bakir and other Kurdish officials said one major issue that must be addressed is Baghdad’s use of Iranian-backed militias in northern Iraq. The Kurds want the militias to withdraw from disputed areas, saying they threaten Iraqi stability, give Iran undue regional influence and could push the conflict beyond Iraq’s borders.

“It will not remain in Iraq,” Mr. Bakir said of current tensions.

That should make the U.S. take a greater interest in a country in which it has been deeply involved for more than a decade, he said.

When asked whether the U.S. could have taken actions to persuade the Kurds to postpone the vote, Mr. Bakir said that while he doesn’t want to revisit the past, the U.S. could have acted more quickly to recognize Kurdish concerns and propose diplomatic answers.

“Had we started earlier, there would have been room for some agreement,” he said.

The U.S. already has a special envoy in the region, Brett McGurk, but his focus is on counter-Islamic State operations, which Mr. Bakir said was a separate issue. External mediation is required because tensions between Erbil and Baghdad seem nearly intractable.

“The language we see in Baghdad is not towards a partner,” Mr. Bakir said. “The language we see from Baghdad is towards an enemy.”