If one can own the whole, who wants division and why?

Barzani's attempt at a referendum for independence has had, and will continue to have, effects that were wholly unexpected, both for himself and for the region.

Perhaps the first visible effect is that the idea of an independent Kurdistan did not enjoy as much international goodwill as had been supposed, and that, with a step taken at a time when the realization of such a project was close, the project has had to be put on hold for a long time, even as an idea.

Indeed, looking at the game the US has been trying to stage in Syria with the PYD, this stands before us as an observation that needs to be tested. Asking at this stage what the US is trying to have the PYD forces, which it has armed disproportionately in the name of fighting DEAŞ, accomplish may lead us to evaluate our first post-referendum observations differently. While arming in this way an organization that is terrorist and that fights against its own allies in NATO, the US is at the same time systematically having that organization carry out ethnic cleansing in the places where it opens space for it. The picture of Raqqa liberated from DEAŞ is the picture of a ruined city with not a stone left standing on another.

The PYD militants, whom the US ushered into this city's ruins like triumphant heroes, have, to add insult to injury, put up photographs of APO. In fact, to reduce a city to this state by aerial bombardment no ground organization is needed at all. There is anyway no liberated city here, only a ruin that has been emptied of people and stands ready to be rebuilt.

What kind of vision for Syria's future can we guess the US has, when it has installed the PYD in this city whose population is almost entirely Arab? Isn't the map of a terror corridor in the north of Syria already visible in this vision?

The question here is why the US is opening to the PYD an area that, at least in appearance, it did not open to Barzani on behalf of the Kurds. At this point it seems that the US attaches far more importance than we do to a difference between Barzani and the PYD. So, in the shadow of the so-called Kurdish state that is to be set up by the PYD and that in function will be a terror corridor, will the attitude of the US or other actors toward an alternative Kurdish state to Barzani's in northern Iraq be different? This is a vital question that must be taken into account when calculations are made about the future of the region.

In the end, one has to see that the real quarrel of the many international actors who did not give strong support to the referendum and preferred at first to wait and see was with Barzani. It was thought that pulling the rug out from under Barzani, given his stance identified until recently with Turkey, would directly or indirectly cost Turkey.

Perhaps what made some hesitate at first to take a clearer stand against Barzani was that Turkey, for the first time in a long while, had taken a clear stand against him. It is certain that some actors who had adjusted all their policies to Turkey were confused by Turkey's parting ways so quickly and so sharply with an ally. It is also clear that they were rubbing their hands in glee at Turkey's war, by its own hand, against its natural ally.

What is done is done, of course, but it would be of great benefit for Turkey to sit down urgently and evaluate this situation as an important opportunity to test or review its own friends and enemies and its strategies in regional politics.

Another important effect of the failure of Barzani's referendum attempt is that it has also put the partition operations on the agenda in the hot zones of the Middle East into difficulty. The partition scenarios that the UAE, which is making serious efforts to split Iraq and Syria, is at the same time trying to stoke in both Yemen and Libya have suffered a great blow with this event. Although it is said that the only one supporting the KRG's referendum attempt was Israel, a much clearer and much more effective support has come from the UAE itself. Moreover, the UAE works not only in Iraq but in all troubled regions as the very source of the problem and in the direction of partition. Aidarus al-Zubaidi, the leader of the Southern movement in Yemen and head of the Southern Transitional Council, had given messages of starting the process of secession, partly under the influence of the first wind of the northern Iraq referendum. But what happened to the KRG has recently changed the climate there entirely.

With the same effect, there is an initiative toward the formation of a new, inclusive and unifying national dialogue council, of which he himself would also be a part, against Haftar, who is supported by the UAE and Egypt and is the cause of the crisis in Libya.

Undoubtedly, how long these effects will last is for the moment uncertain. The goal need not always be partition. One must know that when they believe they can control the whole, they will not want to divide it and leave a part to others. Just as they want to take over the entire control of Libya completely through Haftar.

But then, in an Iraq that is not divided and is united, does control really belong to the Iraqis with all their components, or does all control pass exclusively into the hands of a single element in the name of unity?

Beyond daily words of assurance, it is necessary to stipulate a strong social contract that will safeguard the rights of those who have lived together there for centuries.

And this task, of course, falls to Turkey.