Lefigaro.fr - by Thierry Oberlé

At the age of 71, he had his people vote in favor of self-determination, challenging his neighbors and the international community. A promise he had made to his father, the leader, before him, of a clan working for Kurdish nationalism in the mountains of northern Iraq.

He woved his legend of peshmerga, "he who defies death", up there, in the mountains of Kurdistan. In pictures of youth, he is seen in a gray jacket, with a cartridge belt, and a pistol-holster on his hip, carrying a rifle almost as tall as his shoulder. He has already wrapped around his childish skull his red and white damaged turban that will never leave him. For the Kurds, Massoud Barzani is an icon.

For Europeans in search of a romantic epic, it is a kind of Yasser Arafat of the snowy peaks of the Orient. He is the weak who resists the law of the strongest. It is the Kurdish people, a people without a state, a minority of 40 million people caught in a vise by the Arabs of the plains of Mesopotamia and the Euphrates, the Persians and the Turks. For his opponents of yesterday and today, he is a formidable fighter and an ambitious politician. He is an unpredictable enemy willing to sacrifice his own, to seize wealth for his family and to cope with the devil to ensure his own survival.

After the death of his rival Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi leader Massoud Barzani is, along Ocalan, the Kurdish leader of the Turkish-Syrian PKK, who is imprisoned on a prison island in the Marmara Sea, the last dinosaur in a region in perpetual eruption. He has reigned over his clan for nearly forty years. In 1976, he fired the first symbolic shot of the uprising against the regime of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. On October 13, 2016, he announced by a tweet the outbreak of the campaign for the liberation of Mosul and the Nineveh plain occupied by ISIS. The president of the Kurdistan Regional Government wants to drive the jihadists of the ISIS far from their lands thanks to the support of the fighter planes and the special forces of the westerners, but also to gain territorial and political gains for the accomplishment of his dream: the creation of a Kurdish state in Iraq.

Almost a year later, Massoud Barzani, this Saturday, September 23, two days before the referendum on the independence of Iraqi Kurdistan, go with history. He summoned the international press to his presidential palace built in the rock garden on the heights of Sare Rash, the "Black Heads" in Salaheddin, some thirty kilometers from Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Alliance against nature

Until the end, the chancelleries, worried about the risks of regional destabilization, hoped that he would postpone the consultation. The Americans offered massive financial assistance and guarantees for the future. Emmanuel Macron tried to convince him by telephone. The French have even launched at Erbil a joint diplomatic initiative with the Turks. Baghdad made new proposals. Without success.

Flanked by his faithful secretary, Fouad Hussein, a round man with a bald head, Massoud Barzani confirms that nothing and no one can stop him any more. "We had placed a lot of hope in a peaceful and democratic coexistence, but the new Iraq has sank into confessionalism and has continued to humiliate our people," the Kurdish president said. "In Baghdad, the faces have changed, but the mentalities have remained the same."

Massoud Barzani is alone against all, but as soon as the Rubicon crosses, he defuses his own audacity. The Declaration of Independence? It is not on the agenda and it should not be unilateral. The old political animal is reassuring. He is ready to negotiate the borders with Baghdad and share the oil wealth of the Kirkuk region. He seems convinced that the Iraqi army, with whom he is fighting ISIS, will not attack, at least not in the immediate future; that the Iranians will not engage in a direct showdown. It is ready to withstand the inevitable shock of economic sanctions.

He is proud of his unlikely and unique ally in the region, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the hangman of Kurdish independentists in southeastern Turkey, his brother-enemies. An unnatural alliance sealed when Erdogan was open to dialogue with his minorities. The two leaders now have joint financial and commercial interests. Kurdistan runs its oil via Turkey. And Turkey is flooding Iraq with its goods by passing the Kurdish gate. For Erdogan, Kurdistan is a march, a buffer with the Shiite world, a natural extension of its ambitions, but Barzani must not go beyond the limits. The virulence of the Turkish president's reaction to the continuation of the referendum surprised the Kurdish president. He now knows that he can also turn against him.

On the day of the vote, Massoud Barzani left the presidential complex of Sare Rash, where the nomenklatura of his regime lived, in order to go and gather on his father's tomb, Mustafa Barzani . His ultrasconcerted convoy of black 4x4s took the highway that leads to a verdant valley, stronghold of his tribe. A natural fortress, impregnable, at the entrance marked by the carcasses of Russian tanks, vestiges of the resistance against the forces of Saddam. He joined Barzan, the village of his ancestors from a Sufi brotherhood, in love with nature. Here every man has a rifle and is ready to die for the chief. The village is nestled in an ecological paradise overflown by eagles and traversed by Persian deer, brown bears and wolves. The remains of Moustapha rest on a promontory. The remains of 512 members of the clan, massacred by the regime of the Baathist dictator are buried on a nearby hill overhung by a memorial. These victims are among the 8,000 members of the Barzani tribe, aged 10 to 80 years, arrested in 1983, in retaliation for a revolt against Saddam. Every evening about a hundred of them were executed. Massoud Barzani escaped the hunt. He had taken the lead of his clan a few years earlier, after his father's death, vowing to walk in his footsteps.

Considered by the Kurds of Iraq as a great figure of nationalism, Mustafa Barzani was the ephemeral minister of the Armies of the Republic of Mahabad founded in 1946, in Iranian territory, with the support of Stalin, and swept before the end of the same year by Tehran. Massoud Barzani was born there. "I was born in the shadow of the flag of the first Republic of Kurdistan and I want to die in the shadow of the flag of independent Kurdistan," he said recently in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine.

His saga is a long list of acts of resistance, military reverses and improbable alliances of circumstance. During the Iran-Iraq war, Massoud Barzani plays Teheran, but his insurrection is suppressed by the operation "Anfal", marked in 1988 by chemical bombardment of the city of Halabja (5,000 deaths) . In 1991, it provoked an uprising against Saddam, at the end of the first Gulf War. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds flee in the mountains to the borders. They are rescued from the bombardment by the Security Council, which guarantees, thanks to the establishment of a no-fly zone, a safe shelter that becomes an autonomous sector. Three years later, a fratricidal war broke out between the Barzani and Talabani clans, the powerful Iraqi Kurdish rival who died on Tuesday for the Kurdish pie. Barzani will seek the support of Saddam's chariots. The conflict ends without winning or defeating, with a geographical and financial division of the region into zones of influence. In the north the Barzani dominate, to the south, Talabani and his party, the PUK.
An authoritarian system

Massoud Barzani has since been the sponsor of an endowed Iraqi Kurdistan, after the fall of the dictator and the adoption of a new Constitution in 2005, of institutions in democratic principles. He is the current president although his term has expired two years ago. His nephew Nechirvan, son of Idris, is his dashing prime minister. Very present in business, it was built in a few years one of the largest fortunes of the Middle East. Close to the American "neo-cons", he took advantage of the oil boom to make Erbil a kind of Dubai, between desert and mountain. The provincial town was covered with housing estates, luxury villas, skyscrapers, circular highways and shopping malls. But the money of the petrodollars, which flowed freely, dried up with the fall of the prices of black gold. The region has plunged into recession, the salaries of countless civil servants are amputated, and the prime minister's star has sunk like the sun of the presidential party flag, the KDP.

Masrour, the son of Massoud, heads the Kurdistan security council and controls Kurdish secret services. The urban legend claims that in Erbil, the capital, he is more feared than his father. His name is advanced in case of dynastic succession. Massoud Barzani also relies on Sirwan, a nephew, general pechmerga, who resumed service to engage in the fighting against ISIS. Manager of Korek Telecom, a major mobile phone operator in Iraq, the businessman who had closed his network in Mosul only when the ISIS had turned against the Kurds.

Leaders of the Gorran opposition party denounce an authoritarian system based on corruption, nepotism and clientelism. It is thus common knowledge in the business community that the Barzani networks are unavoidable to win contracts. Bribes have become the norm. Formed for the youngest in the best American and European business schools, the apparatchiks of the new potentate earn dividends, while the population is impoverished. Aged 71, Massoud Barzani claims he will not run for a new presidential term. At the same time, it assures that it will carry out its independence project until the end. A process is underway to hold general elections which should not prevent Barzani from remaining the real boss. A country of dust, Iraqi Kurdistan enters a period of fog.