The most dangerous defeat for Kurdistan is when the ceiling of its prisons becomes the ceiling of its leaders’ ambitions—when they ask the state that partitioned their land for better terms of residency, and then deem thinking about sovereignty to be recklessness. When the party becomes larger in a leader’s consciousness than the homeland, liberation turns into a mere slogan to mobilize the public, and partial rights become the end of the project rather than its steps. The dilemma is not a lack of sacrifices; it is the inability of politics to transform those sacrifices into a force that establishes a homeland.
The Kurdish emirates did not fall to military superiority alone. In the history of Baban, Soran, Badinan, and Ardalan, resistance to centralization was intertwined with rivalry among emirates and subordination to the power balances of the Sultan and the Shah. Instead of accumulating their resources in a political center to safeguard their independent decision-making, these resources were depleted in preserving family rule and spheres of influence. While it is inaccurate to project the modern nation-state concept onto them, their lesson remains ever-present: whoever seeks external assistance to protect their emirate from a neighbor makes it easier for that power to swallow them both.
A portion of this dilemma transitioned into the party era. The Kurdish movement was not devoid of independence projects and statehood experiments; however, broad sectors of it made negotiating over rights their practical program, leaving sovereignty for anthems and ceremonial occasions. When questions arise regarding the tools to achieve it, circumstances are invoked to postpone the matter. Circumstances explain the difficulty of the project; they do not justify the absence of planning for it. A leadership that waits for dangers to vanish before building the components of a state will wait for a long time, while its adversaries build a reality that makes liberation even harder.
Administrative and political gains do not advance automatically. They risk turning into apparatuses for employment and quota distribution, eventually aging under a management that fears changing them. Protecting them requires an independent judiciary, transparent resources, an education system that produces competent talent, and a defense force subject to institutional governance. These are the foundations of a viable state to be built prior to its declaration. Reducing achievement to the organization’s continued hold on institutions converts what was extracted for the people into a guarantee for the leadership’s survival.
In Southern Kurdistan, the 2017 independence referendum, led by President Masoud Barzani, carried a significance transcending its immediate result: it presented a transition from regional administration to deciding sovereignty. It did not materialize into a state and faced overt international opposition, yet it proved that independence is a demand that can be translated into a political procedure rather than a forbidden wish. What is required now is to examine the reasons for its setback and build the conditions for a more mature attempt, neither reducing it to glorifying the occasion nor burying it under the cost of retreat.
Signs of developing this step have begun to emerge through international diplomatic relations and conferences encompassing most Kurdistani forces—attempts that lay the groundwork for a strategy extending beyond the boundaries of the party and the federal region, despite the loss of significant geographical territory and the persistence of external pressures and party conflicts. Our duty is to support and expand these efforts, and to expose their shortcomings to correct them, without turning criticism into a sledgehammer that destroys what has begun to take shape. An incomplete initiative is completed through participation; stalling it while waiting for perfection squanders the opportunity to build.
In Western Kurdistan, the forces of the Autonomous Administration bear the responsibility of answering for the distance between the institutions they established and the sacrifices made, and a project that consolidates national rights and decision-making ownership. The methodology of the “Democratic Nation” does not exempt it from stating the position of the Kurds as a people with land and political rights. Pluralism does not require dissolving their cause; it demands a clear social contract that protects them and their partners. When this clarity is absent, the gap widens between mobilizing people for defense and defining the future they are defending.
This responsibility does not fall upon the Autonomous Administration alone. The National Council and all other forces must present a vision for governance, the economy, security, and constitutional rights, and accept testing their visions through dialogue and participation. An opposition that confines itself to condemning the administration, and an administration that considers monopolizing decision-making a condition for protecting gains, share the responsibility of stalling the alternative. No one builds a state while rejecting their partner, nor does one forge sovereignty while waiting for an external ally to deliver it.
The same standard applies to Northern and Eastern Kurdistan: What are we preparing for tomorrow outside the party apparatus? Where are the plans for resource management, diplomat training, standardizing legal terminology, language protection, and organizing defense? One may disagree on the structure of the state and the timing of its declaration, but halting these endeavors under the pretext of disagreement over the end goal dissipates what is possible today. The Kurdistani project begins when institutions become capable of serving the people and holding their leaders accountable, even if the ruling parties change.
The tyranny of the regimes occupying Kurdistan and the interests of major powers dictate precise calculations. Here, political acumen is tested: seizing what is achievable today and building the capacity to expand it tomorrow, without presenting temporary concessions as an eternal doctrine. We do not need a declaration of a state every morning; we need a leadership that builds its conditions every single day. Kurdistan will not become a state through the sheer number of those who die in its name, unless there is politics that knows how to transform their sacrifices into institutions, sovereignty, and decision-making authority.
United States of America
October 17, 2026
Note: This text is translated from the original Arabic version… Read the Arabic version:Click here
