By Sivan Gamliel
It was recently reported that 5 were killed in a shooting attack in Bnei Brak. This came after the ISIS-inspired terror attack in Hadera killed two and the terror attack in Be’ersheva killed 4. This also comes after Iran attacked the American Consul in Erbil and the Houthis once again attacked Saudi Arabia. In the wake of these regional developments, it appears that the best response to such terror is to encourage that more countries join the Abraham Accords and that an independent Kurdish state is developed in order to break up the Shia Crescent.
In an exclusive interview with Saad Saud Hamawandi, President Masoud Barzani`s consultant, he stated that the slogan of an independent Kurdish state helping the Abraham Accords may be shocking but “let us get out of ideals, slogans and nationalisms and look a little bit at our reality in the Middle East and the extent of fanatical religious hostility that at every stage opens the doors of hell on earth in the names of the promised paradise.”
According to Hamawandi, “These days last year, Pope Francis visited Iraq, and this visit, let us be frank, came because religious minorities were persecuted, killed and forcibly displaced in the name of religion, and this may be repeated today, tomorrow and years later. Although the Pope spoke of tolerance and brotherhood between religions and between Muslims and Christians in particular, we have not found any real application of the events of his visit except merely media waves that have done nothing. The reason for this is very simple: religious discourse to date carries with it the distinction between the heavenly religions.”
He added: “We have doctrines that reject each other but do not reject the origin, and reject the branches to each other making a big and wide rift to make extremism and terrorism prevail. So the solution in my humble opinion lies in returning to the original concepts of Abraham. Abrahamic religious thought accepts each other and is not hostile to each other.”
The concept of returning to the regional Abrahamic concept where Jews, Christians and Muslims coexist is the basis of the Abraham Accords, which Israel, Egypt, Bahrain, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan support. If the Kurds get independence and join them as well, then it will break up the Shia Crescent from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea and also serve as a roadblock for ISIS making further inroads in the Middle East.
Hamawandi also thinks this will be good for Christians: “The number of Christians in Iraq has recently exceeded 2 million Christians, but today we see less than half a million in a clear process of emptying Christians from Iraq, especially Baghdad, as well as for Jews who have been displaced in Iraq and so on.”
He stressed: “We are fed up with the game of inflaming religious conflicts and pushing religious intolerance to work at full capacity. The partial provocative efforts that take place here and there have not had the desired effect on peoples. Ordinary individuals in all religions do not know intolerance, but are tolerant by nature, and all they hope for in their world is to live more decently, some of them provoke the ideas they hear here or there, but in the end link them to their owners, because they believe in nature and religion has a God to protect.”
According to him, “But here I must emphasize an important thing: the Kurdistan region, despite its simple living, has indirectly been able to create an Abrahamic religion without naming it and without urging it, simply because the policy pursued by the Kurdistan Region is based on words and actions on religious equality and the non-exposure of a religious party to another, which has created a parallel between the Abrahamic religions and has led them to be a symbol of coexistence and peace.”
“As a Kurdish nationality, we are subjected to the fact that all the pain we have experienced is displacement, murder, imprisonment, exile, division and much more, and we know what it means to exclude one side at the expense of another,” Hamawandi added. “Therefore, Kurdistan was and still is the size of a country that knows ways to establish peace, security, love, gratitude and even equality. A geographically independent Kurdistan, intellectually and ideologically independent, may have been one of the first civilizations to unite religions in a single crucible of peace.” We hope that the policy pursued by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) by Masrour Barzani, the descendant of the struggle family, will lay the foundations for the Kurds obtaining independence and joining the Abraham Accords.
