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Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-30/the-kurds-get-a-second-chance-in-syria.html
The Kurds Get a Second Chance
(Bloomberg) Fouad Ajami - More than 200,000 Syrian Kurdish refugees have moved into Iraqi Kurdistan - in the Kurdish world view, a passage from one part of their homeland to another. The Kurds disregard the frontiers imposed almost a century ago by Anglo-French power. A new life is stirring in Kurdistan. Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, is a booming city of shopping malls, high-rises and swank hotels. Oil and natural gas have remade the city, as has its political stability, remarkable when set against the mayhem of the rest of Iraq. The Kurdish regional government and almost 5 million people who are officially part of Iraq in reality belong to an independent nation. The Kurds inhabit fragments of Syria by the Turkish and Iraqi borders, in the northeast; their lands contain the bulk of Syria's oil. The writer is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.