For many Americans and Europeans, news that thousands of Iraqi Kurds are among the refugees stranded on the border between Belarus and Poland might have come as a surprise. After all, the Kurdish region of Iraq was supposed to be the one part of that blighted country that had, with substantial Western assistance, escaped the wider tragedy that has played out since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
That many Iraqi Kurds are now seeking instead to escape from the region shows the extent to which hopes for economic and political opportunity in the post-Saddam Hussein era have evaporated.