"To further complicate things, the British attached the province of Mosul to this new nation Iraq. Mosul was actually part of the Turkish homeland. But oil had recently been discovered in Mosul, and the British did not want the new Turkish republic to have oil, just in case the Turks should, later in the 20th century, decide to attempt reforming their empire. So now the Iraqi Sunni Arabs had to dominate the Kurds as well, something they had not had to do in the past. The Kurds were not Arabs, but Indo-European, like the Iranians. The Kurds of the region had been trying, for thousands of years, to establish their own state. They were never able to do it, and resisted attempts by others to govern them.

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And it gets worse, because the Sunni Arab dictatorship got worse as time went on. The last 10-15 years of Saddam's rule were particularly horrible for the Kurds and Shia Arabs. There were massacres and constant terror from Saddam's secret police. So not only are the Sunni Arabs now outnumbered, and facing over a quarter million soldiers and police they do not control, they are also on the receiving end of revenge attacks by millions of enraged Kurds and Shia Arabs.

This is not the recipe for civil war, it's the prelude to massacre and mass expulsion. Of the Sunni Arabs. In Iraq, everyone is aware of this, but too many foreigners, including many who should know better, just don't get it."