THERE is a telling moment when travellers from Baghdad arrive at Arbil airport in Kurdistan: a policewoman asks for their passports, but someone has half-hidden the plastic sign with “passports” written on it behind a cabinet and Iraqis can show their domestic identity cards. But the impression is of landing in a foreign country.

That feeling is reinforced on the streets of Kurdistan, Iraq’s northern region, which has been autonomous since 1991. While the rest of Iraq is in fear of car bombs, assassins and kidnappers, in Kurdistan the peshmerga militia are everywhere, ensuring stability with an iron fist.

“Kurdistan will be independent. It could be a month, it could be ten years, but I’ll live to see it,” said Farhad Owni Mowaht, 58, the head of the journalists’ union in Arbil and an MP for the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) of Masoud Barzani, the President of the region. Mr Barzani will meet Tony Blair in Downing Street today, having travelled to London from Washington where he held talks with President Bush.

Faisa Abdullah, 27, a mother of two, grew up in Baghdad and raised her two Arabic-speaking children there until last year, when the lack of security and playground slurs against her children as American “collaborators” drove her back to her homeland. “I think Kurdistan should be independent,” she said. “It’s one community, with no spies, traitors or collaborators. But the ‘when’ is a question for the politicians to decide.”

It is a sentiment expressed the length of Kurdistan. After decades of fighting with the regimes in Baghdad, attempted genocide by Saddam Hussein and a bloody power struggle between the KDP and its rival the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in the 1990s, the Kurds feel that they have earned the right to self-determination.

But many acknowledge that the time is not yet right. An overt drive for independence could cause mayhem in a fraught region where 40 million Kurds are spread across northern Iraq, neighbouring Turkey, Syria and Iran. But ordinary Kurds insist that they trust their leaders.

In Akre, which is a pretty, leafy town pinned to a mountainside by a large white mosque, Kamal Ramadan, the head of the local television news, has a map on his wall of a country that starts with Sulaymaniyah in the south, snakes round to the Turkish coast and ends in Syria in the north. The name of this mythical land — larger than the reality — is Kurdistan. “It’s not a dream, it is a right for the Kurds,” he said. Jufiar Akree, a professor at Arbil University’s politics department, said that more time was needed to develop democracy in Kurdistan.

“The difference between here and the US or Europe is that the political regime is directing public opinion, whereas in the developed world it’s the other way round,” he said.

A LAND APART

• About 15 million Kurds, almost half of all Kurds, live in Turkey
• There are around 5 million Kurds in Iraq, representing about 20 per cent of the Iraqi population
• Kurds were first promised a state of their own by the international community in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres
• There are two main Kurdish dialects, Kurmanji and Sorani

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