Betrayel, after betrayel, after betrayel that has left thousands of Kurds of dead at the hands of Saddam, after they helped the USA on previous occasions, or were promised help by the US.
No wonder the Kurds don’t particularly trust the US actions in Iraq today
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/media/rubin/rubin-kurdistan.htm
…But right now the Kurds aren’t keen to put their resources at America’s disposal. In April, Barzani and Talabani refused permission for the CIA to renew a permanent American presence in the region. Efforts by American diplomats to convince the two Kurdish leaders to jointly sign a public document outlining a joint vision for a federal Iraq have come to naught. In February both KDP and PUK refused to allow an Iraqi National Congress (INC) radio transmitter on their territory, even though both parties are members of the INC. That same month Barzani declared to The Wall Street Journal, “We will not be party to any project that will endanger what we have achieved.” While most Iraqi Kurds despise Saddam as a mass murderer and would like nothing more than to see him deposed, they don’t want to provoke him without guarantees that Washington is serious. And based on past U.S. behavior, they aren’t convinced that if they rise up once again, Washington will finish the job.
The leaders of the Iraqi Kurds have long memories compounded by a sometimes self-defeating obsession with foreign betrayal. “How can we trust the United States?” Barzani asked me rhetorically in an interview last spring. “You only care about your own interests, not ours.” He illustrated his contention with a narrative of U.S. abandonment centered around three key incidents. The first occurred in 1975 when Henry Kissinger brokered the Algiers agreement, suspending (temporarily, it turned out) the then-low-grade conflict between Iran and Iraq (full-scale war erupted five years later). As part of the deal, Kissinger effectively pulled the rug out from beneath the Iranian-supported Kurdish rebellion in Iraq, forcing tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds into Iranian refugee camps. In a January 2000 interview, Deputy Kurdish Prime Minister Sami Abdul Rahman called Kissinger’s actions “the most cruel betrayal in our history – which is full of betrayals.”
The second American betrayal came in 1987 and 1988, after up to 182,000 Kurds died in an ethnic-cleansing campaign that began when the Iraqi government bulldozed more than 4,000 of the 4,650 Kurdish villages in northern Iraq and culminated in Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against civilian Kurds. While Saddam carried out the infamous Halabja attack allegedly in retaliation for Kurdish militia support for Iranian forces, most of the villages attacked and destroyed were civilian and far from the Iranian frontier. But in order not to antagonize Saddam, whom the United States was then seeking to engage, the United States denied knowledge of the ethnic cleansing. Three years later a map noting each destroyed village – compiled using American satellite intelligence, printed by the Pentagon’s Defense Mapping Agency, and declassified for use by U.S. troops at the start of the Gulf war – proved America’s duplicity.
Finally, the Kurds hold the United States largely responsible for the failure of their post-Gulf war uprising one decade ago. On February 15, 1991, President George H.W. Bush called on “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” And the Kurds, along with antigovernment Shia in Iraq’s South, dutifully rose up – only to have the U.S. military withhold air cover and let them be crushed. Many Kurds believe that the United States was not simply feckless, but that it wanted the rebellions defeated. “If the U.S. wanted us to oust Saddam, we could have,” Mam Rustam, a PUK commander, explained. “But instead the Americans released the Republican Guard POWs, just in time for them to rearm, remobilize, and attack us.”