Eli Lake, Columnist

The U.S. Must Tell Its Allies to Back Off the Kurds

Iraq and Turkey are panicking, but the Trump administration can defuse this time bomb.

September 28, 2017 at 10:31 AM EDT

Corrected

September 28, 2017 at 5:58 PM EDT

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Iraq's Kurds are waving flags, not waging war. No need to escalate.
Photographer: Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images

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No one expected the neighbors to be happy when Iraq's Kurds voted for independence this week. After all, even though the Kurds say the Iraqi constitution does not forbid a referendum on statehood, there is still a regional war going on against the Islamic State. It's a chaotic moment to be talking about redrawing national borders.

Even still, the reaction from Ankara, Baghdad and Tehran to an expression of Kurdish self determination has been extreme.

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