This time tomorrow voters in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) will deliver their response to one question: “Do you want the Kurdistan region and the Kurdistani areas outside the region’s administration to become an independent state?” If the size of the rallies thronging the streets and stadia of Erbil, the de facto capital of the Kurdish region are anything to go by, then the answer is most likely to be a resounding yes.

As people go to the polls here in a referendum on statehood, leaders of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region say a “yes” result will mark the first step in a process of separation from Iraq and its government in Baghdad. The vote will not, they stress, mark an abrupt splintering from the rest of the country.

“On the road to independence, the referendum is only one step,” Hoshyar Zebari, a top Kurdish official and former Iraqi foreign minister was quoted recently as saying.

“Many think we will have the referendum on the 25th and independence on the 26th. Life is not that simple, building a state needs a lot of homework,” Zebari added.

His remarks will do little to reassure the Iraqi government in Baghdad and its prime minister, Haider al-Abadi. Nor will it resonate well with Iraq’s regional neighbours and international community who are almost universally against the referendum.

For weeks running up to tomorrow’s ballot, key Iraqi politicians and parties have been in constant contact with neighbouring countries Turkey, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia as well as representatives of the US, UK, France and the UN secretary general, all of whom strongly oppose the referendum. Seldom has a democratic poll in such a small place been so denounced by so many international powers.

Russia remains the only major power not to have called on Iraq’s Kurds to cancel the referendum and last week became the top funder of Kurdish oil and gas deals, with as much as $4 billion pledged in less than a year.

To coincide with tomorrow’s referendum, Russian state oil giant Rosneft announced its latest investment to help Iraqi Kurdistan develop its natural gas industry for domestic supplies and eventual export.

The full value of the deal has not been disclosed officiall, but according to industry sources it is worth more than $1bn.

The scale of the deal is a measure of how seriously the international community takes the Kurdish referendum, and why, potentially, volatile times might lie ahead in the region as a result.

There is also opposition closer to home among some Kurds themselves. Many feel the time is not right for an independence vote, choosing instead to subscribe to the wider US and UK belief that the referendum only distracts from the job in hand of routing the Islamic State (IS) group from their strongholds in northern Iraq.

Businessman Shaswar Abdulwahid Qadir has led a “Not for Now” campaign. He says the referendum is being held to distract from pressing problems that he argues the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) has failed to address.

Some Kurds object because, they argue, Kurdish president Masoud Barzani is using it to entrench the rule of his Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), whose struggle for pre-eminence with its rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), erupted into civil war in the 1990s.

Certainly the campaign to oust IS jihadists is not over. For more than a year now Kurdish peshmerga fighters alongside the Iraqi army have fought to liberate towns and cities like Mosul and Tal Afar. Over the last few days, just as the KRI was gearing up for its referendum, Iraqi forces launched an offensive to expel IS from Hawija, one of the last two areas in the country still held by the jihadists. Such a military operation would normally have made greater headlines but has been overshadowed by the dispute over the referendum between the Baghdad central government and the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

In Erbil, however, the mood on the streets tells a different story. Everywhere the Kurdish red-white-green tricolour flag set with a blazing golden sun adorn cars and buildings. Billboards exhort “the time is now – say ‘yes’ to a free Kurdistan!”

It is a far cry from a few weeks ago when I was last here and there were few signs of political campaigning, as the go-ahead for the referendum still hung in the balance as a result of international pressure.

Many Kurds see the vote, though non-binding, as a historic opportunity to achieve self-determination a century after Britain and France divided the Middle East under the Sykes-Picot agreement. That arrangement left 30 million Kurds scattered over Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

But as more than 5.2 million registered voters prepare to go to polling stations tomorrow the clamour of regional and international opposition to the referendum remains unrelenting.

Speaking live on television on Friday, Turkish prime minister Binali Yildirim said the vote posed a threat to national security and Ankara “will do what is necessary” to protect itself. He did not elaborate, but the message was clear and unequivocal.

Yildirim’s words echoed those earlier last week of his Iraqi counterpart, prime minister al-Abadi who threatened to use military force saying the referendum was unconstitutional.

It is hard to over-emphasise how much of a potential tinderbox these developments are in the Middle East. At the heart of the political storm and the most likely place where violence might spark is the oil-rich and ethnically-mixed city of Kirkuk and its surrounding areas.

The Kurdistan region produces around 600,000 barrels per day of oil, with the Kirkuk province alone producing around one-quarter of the region’s oil.

If the Kurdish region does break away from Baghdad then Kirkuk would fall along the border between the two, with control over the area bitterly contested by Kurdish and Iraqi forces.

Tensions in Kirkuk have risen in recent days as the rhetoric between the Kurdish leadership and Iraq’s central government escalates, and after Baghdad voted to oust Kirkuk’s governor Najmaldin Karim from office because of the referendum.

At least one Kurd in the Kirkuk area has already been killed in pre-referendum clashes after a Kurdish convoy celebrating the vote was shot at last week and security checkpoints have been erected across the city to prevent further violence.

Tomorrow’s vote will be held in the three governorates officially ruled by the KRG, Erbil, Dohuk and Sulaymaniyah, that constitute the nation’s Kurdish region, as well as Kirkuk and disputed areas currently controlled by Kurdish peshmerga fighters taken during the offensive to retake territory from IS.

As always, calculating the political and military balance of power in Iraq is an elusive thing because so many players are involved and the way they come together is unpredictable.

But tomorrow’s referendum has the potential to change the political landscape of Iraq in ways that as yet appear to have failed to fully register on the international news agenda. The stakes are indeed high, and the ramifications could be profound.

“For independence we must pay any price needed because we prefer freedom over subordination or oppression,” Kurdish president Barzani told a rally on Friday in Erbil, adding that Kurdish peshmerga fighters had earned the right to self-determination by battling IS.

“They praise peshmerga sacrifices but don’t let peshmerga and our martyrs’ families decide their destiny,” he said as tens of thousands cheered and waved Kurdish flags.

“We reaffirm to the UN Security Council that our fight against terror will continue,” he said, dismissing concerns that the vote would undermine the drive, which requires co-operation with Baghdad, to crush IS in their last remaining Iraq strongholds.

Tomorrow’s vote may well prove a game-changer, not just for the Kurds but the region as a whole and the international community’s engagement with the Middle East.

“This is the last five metres of the final sprint and we will be standing our ground,” said Hoshyar Zebari, senior Kurdish adviser to Barzani on Friday.

Tomorrow, Iraqi Kurds will vote and prove whether they, too, are willing to make that push towards the finishing line of an independent Kurdish state.

The Herald:

COMMENT: ‘In Kurdistan as in Catalonia, suppression of democratic self-determination can only incentivise unrest’

By Alyn Smith MEP

THE current heartbreak in the Middle East and the problems that have dogged the region are largely created by our foreign policy, recent and historic. I’m here in Erbil, Iraq as a member of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee to do what decades of Empire did not – listen to the locals and see what we can do to help find a peaceful solution. I’m not here to support the referendum, I’m here to see for myself how things actually are and see what the EU can do to help. As a Scot, I’m here to support and respect the legitimate right to self-determination. With that right comes responsibilities, to respect and protect minorities, and to be sensitive and pragmatic to the neighbours.

The referendum has been a long time coming. Kurds are the world’s largest unrepresented nation, around 30 million people spread across southeast Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. For decades under Saddam Hussein’s pan-Arab dictatorship, the Kurdish people were marginalised and oppressed. The present Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), formally one of the three federal parts of post-Saddam Iraq, has achieved a degree of stability, remaining united beyond sectarian lines where much of Iraq has descended into violence. Kurds are mostly Sunni, but also Shi’ite, Alevi, Christian Assyrian, Jewish, Yazidi and Zoroastrian. This stability and co-existence matters, and the KRG deserves much credit for providing a safe haven to refugees – according to the UN, 95 per cent of Syrian refugees in Iraq are in KRG territory. The KRG military forces, the Peshmerga, have also been at the forefront in the fight against the so-called Islamic State, a conflict that at long last shows some signs of turning.

It has been far from smooth sailing, and the KRG is far from perfect. There are serious shortcomings of the Kurdish government, critical voices in the media have been silenced and political opposition is fragile. More worryingly, some Kurdish forces have been accused of serious war crimes, such as ethnic cleansing against Arab populations in the territories that the so-called Islamic State briefly held. Investigations and accountability must follow, but, by the standards of the region, the Kurds in Iraq are the closest thing to a success story you’ll find.

Dealings with Baghdad have always been fraught, but it is now clear that the Baghdad regime has comprehensively failed to observe by the various agreements on sharing of resources, notably oil revenues, and defence and security co-operation and further devolution of powers. Kurdish frustration at the lack of progress in talks with Baghdad has led them to bring forward a referendum on independence, with the question: “Do you want the Kurdistan region and the Kurdistani areas outside the region’s administration to become an independent state?” set to be posed to the population tomorrow.

This despite opposition from Baghdad, Tehran, Ankara and, indeed, Washington and Brussels over concern that the vote may well inflame tensions. It may well. One concern is that this referendum discusses territory not presently part of the KRG in a region not short of territorial disputes with powerful neighbours. Over recent years when I have met Iraqi Kurdistan’s leaders, they have all committed to respecting democratic values despite the regional context, to guarantee minorities’ rights and protect them, and to support the path to independence peacefully, through the ballot box. Any commitment to a democratic process is surely to be encouraged, not suppressed.

This is where the international community needs to step up, and protect democracy and international law. As the old Empire-era borders – be they British, Ottoman or French – chaotically unravel, the international community must do more to manage that process. Be it in Catalonia or Kurdistan, rights to self-determination must be allowed free and democratic expression – suppression can only incentivise unrest. These are not just internal matters, in our interconnected world we need a new mechanism to help manage these processes. Sadly, I don’t see much of a willingness in the UN to be that honest broker, but maybe the EU could be. An independent Scotland could encourage that discussion in a time when the world needs cool heads and clear voices.