The United States and other Western nations are worried that the vote could ignite a fresh conflict with Baghdad and turn into another regional flashpoint.
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
, Iran and Syria, which together with Iraq have sizeable Kurdish populations, all oppose an independent Kurdistan.
"The date is standing, Sept. 25, no change," said Hoshyar Zebari, a close adviser to Kurdistan Regional Government President
Massoud Barzani... hereditary head of the Kurdish Democratic Party, maybe a little too close to the Medes and the Persians for most people's tastes...
, after US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asked Barzani to postpone the referendum.
Tillerson made the request in a phone call with Barzani on Thursday, Zebari said.
"On the issue of the postponement of the referendum, the President (Barzani) stated that the people of the Kurdistan Region would expect guarantees and alternatives for their future," said a statement issued on Friday by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) presidency, after Tillerson’s call.
The US State Department said in June it was concerned that the referendum will distract from "more urgent priorities" such as the defeat of ISIS holy warriors.
ISIS’s self-proclaimed "caliphate" effectively collapsed last month, when US-backed Iraqi forces completed the takeover of the holy warriors’ capital in Iraq, djinn-infested Mosul
... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn...
, after a nine-month campaign in which Kurdish Peshmerga fighters took part.
The hardline Sunni
The Kurds have been seeking an independent state since at least the end of World War One, when colonial powers divided up the Middle East, but their territory ended up split between modern-day Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.
Barzani, whose father led struggles against Baghdad in the 1960s and 1970s, told Rooters in July the Kurds would take responsibility for the expected ’yes’ outcome of the referendum, and pursue its implementation through dialogue with Baghdad and regional powers to avoid conflict." We have to rectify the history of mistreatment of our people and those who are saying that independence is not good, our question to them is, ’if it’s not good for us, why is it good for you?’," he said in an interview in the KRG capital, Erbil.