Kurdistan Thrives Despite War With ISIS

A suicide-bomber blew himself up and killed three people—the terrorist himself, along with two Turkish citizens—in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, at a popular café just down the street from the US Consulate.

ISIS is taking credit, of course, and there’s no reason to doubt it since they’re in the midst of a hot war with the Kurds. And the front line is just 30 miles away—an easy morning commute—from Erbil’s city center.

The attack took place in Ainkawa, however, a lively and prosperous Christian suburb of Erbil that was once geographically separate but has, in the last couple of years, been absorbed into the sprawl thanks to an explosive infilling construction boom.

The death toll is low, but it’s fair to say this was an attack against Christians, Kurds, and Americans simultaneously.

We know already that ISIS has genocidal intentions toward the region’s Christians, Shia Muslims, Yezidis, and Alawites. Late last year they murdered and raped thousands of members of Iraq’s Yezidi minority, and just yesterday they frog-marched a large group of  Ethiopian Christians down to a beach in Libya and beheaded them on camera. (No doubt they’d try to kill all the Jews if Israel wouldn’t bust out the doom hammer.)

My friend Asher Abrams is in Erbil right now—as a tourist. He expected “an interesting but uneventful visit for a couple of weeks,” but then, boom. Not 24 hours after he landed, while he was still recovering from his flight, he heard a loud explosion followed by what sounded like firecrackers. He looked out the window of his hotel room and saw a rising column of smoke.

“People appeared to be mostly going about their business,” he wrote on his blog. “If I was expecting mass panic, it was not to be found.”

Yeah, well, the Kurds are indefatigable. An occasional car bomb now and then is nothing compared to what they went through a couple of decades ago, when almost 200,000 were murdered, some of them with chemical weapons, during Saddam Hussein’s genocidal Anfal Campaign.

In any case, Erbil is a tough place for ISIS to operate. The Kurds are no more enamored of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s legion of genocidaires than Americans are, and they’re currently fighting much harder. Their intelligence networks are state of the art, and anyone who doesn’t speak locally accented Hawleri Kurdish stands out as once.

The world’s nastiest army is banging on the door, but these people are doing such a good keeping the wolf away that the place is booming despite it all. Middle class and elite housing is going up everywhere, most famously in the area known as Dream City which includes a replica of the White House.

KFC is in Kurdistan now. So is TGI Fridays. Pizza Hut has been there for a while. Starbucks might even open a store in one of the brand-new malls.

Call it crass consumerism if you want, but it’s an extraordinary thing inside the borders of Iraq. After so many years of isolation from the rest of the human race—first under the boot heel of Saddam Hussein, then international sanctions followed by the Iraq war—having international chains makes the Kurds feel like they are part of this world, like they’re no longer living in some alternate dimension.

Last time I was there, in the late 2000s, they didn’t even have international banks. Credit cards weren’t accepted anywhere. Nor were ATM cards. I had to bring huge pocketfuls of cash or I’d find myself stranded and broke. The locals were mostly unaffected by this, of course, but they knew they were cut off and they wanted international chains. I saw one fake franchise after another—at least three McDonald’s knockoffs with names like “MaDonal,” and a bogus Dominoes Pizza outlet that went ahead and called itself Dominoes Pizza and even put a trademark-infringed logo on the banner outside.

The Kurds don’t need that kind of fakery anymore. Their autonomous region is alas still part of Iraq, but it’s also part of the world. I wouldn’t call it the Dubai of Iraq just yet, but every day it looks and feels more like Jordan and less like the howling wilderness of poisoned mass graves that it used to be.

One of these days, the Kurds will enjoy independence and join not only the rest of the world but also the United Nations as a member state and the roster of robust American allies. ISIS might be able to dent that progress a little with an attack here and there, but it can’t stop what’s coming. Neither, for that matter, can Baghdad.