Re: What Happens After Mosul: After ISIL is Defeated, Kurdish Forces May Push for Independent Territory, by Matthew Fisher October 18, 2016 to The Vancouver Sun: So what if the Kurds seek independence? The Kurds are the only good guys in this whole cruel, chaotic catastrophe. Saddam Hussein gassed them by the thousands, back when there really were weapons of mass destruction. Yet beyond organizing an effective, semi-autonomous administration of their own territory in northern Iraq in the postwar governance vaccuum, they have never said, or in actions suggested, that they sought territorial expansion or subjugation of others. Their Peshmerga fighters have been the only effective military force on the ground in the region and they have only fought for defense of their land, and to help others under attack by the jihadis. In 2014, when ISIL massacred whole villages of Yasidis except for the young women whom they sold into sex slavery, who came to the aid of survivors clustering on a remote mountain? Not Canada, politically afraid to put “boots on the ground”. Not Iraqi forces, who ran away. Not the USA or the UK, although they dropped supplies from aircrafft. Only the Peshmerga came to save the Yasidis. In Turkey, no doubt the PKK have committed atrocities, but far fewer than the government of Turkey has committed against them in a brutal, sustained campaign of intimidation. But Turkish Kurds have elected members to Turkey’s parlimant, participating in such democracy as is available to them. In Syria, Peshmerga fighters have liberated Kurdish villages from ISIS, but have refused to be drawn into the wider conflicts. Yes, Kurds have been accused of driving Arabs out of their territory in Iraq, but their side of this story is that these were “foreigners” whom Saddam Hussein had forcibly settled in Kurdish territory. Arming Kurds can only serve humanitarian goals in the short term. In the long term it is unlikely to lead to calls for sovereignty, but even if it does, it would solve more problems than it creates. What is wrong with self-determination for a people with their own language and culture who are abused by every country that their ancestral homeland covers?