The problem with
It was drawn by politicians out of political means. See, before all that, national and ethnic lines were understood to be at natural barriers.
Mountains and rivers and oceans make the best natural boundaries. And people naturally divide themselves around them.
So when you tell a people group that has lived in the mountains of a region for thousands of years that they are now to be governed by outsiders, in a capital 700 km away across the plains, it is not bound to go well.
The Kurds know—and never for a moment forget—what most people in the world have never understood. The nation of Iraq is not a centuries-old country with natural boundaries and an organically blended population. Instead, Iraq is a structure of artificial boundaries and unnaturally combined tribes and religions conceived by Europeans just after World War I.
-Stephen Mansfield, The Miracle of The Kurds