The independence referendum among Iraqi Kurds seemed a turning point in this minority’s search for statehood. The overwhelming vote to break away was celebrated far into the night by deliriously happy Kurds. Yet just three weeks on with the Iraqi government’s reoccupation of Kirkuk and the seizure of a third of the oil production on which a Kurdish state would have to rely, the exultant mood has changed to one of anger and despair.

The referendum was a direct challenge to the Iraqi state and to Turkey whose troops are fighting their own war against rebels among their own Kurdish minority. It was also a significant challenge to the international community. Many countries warned against the plebiscite. Not least among them was the United States, whose no-fly zone enforced along with the British and French from 1991 protected Iraq’s Kurdish region from retaliation by Saddam Hussein following his ejection from Kuwait.

There is undoubted popular sympathy, particularly in Europe and North America, for the Kurds. The image of the plucky little Peshmerga fighter in his baggy pantaloons, defeating the killers of Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) was built up by visiting international media who know their audiences thrill to stories of brave underdogs fighting their corner.

And the Kurds did a fine job of building up their reputation. But Masoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish Regional Government, ignored political realities. His people already enjoyed a large measure of autonomy. He had laid claim to some 600,000 barrels a day of Iraqi oil production with the help of foreign oil entrepreneurs prepared to brave the ire of Baghdad and its international lawyers. But exports passed through a pipeline that ran through Turkey. It was a no-brainer that this export route would be cut by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Ankara has absolutely no wish to see an independent Kurdish state that would provide a refuge for the terrorists of Turkey’s own PKK guerrillas.

It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which Barzani blundered by calling the independence vote. He not only triggered Baghdad’s reoccupation of Kirkuk, with its mixed Arab-Kurdish population, but he has also fractured what had appeared wrongly to the outside world to be Kurdish unity.

Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) has long been at odds with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) dominated by the rival Talabani family. The two clans fought a three-year civil war in the 1990s in which as many as 8,000 died. The PUK did not join the KDP and other smaller Kurdish parties in their support for the referendum. From the party’s base in the city of Sulaymaniyah there was little enthusiasm for the exercise run from the KDP’s heartland around the regional capital of Irbil. Iraq’s first elected president was the Kurd Jalal Talabani, who died last month. Under article 140 of the Iraqi constitution, which the PUK still supports, there was to be a reversal of Saddam’s “Arabization” of the Kurdish region. There was also to be an equitable sharing of oil revenues.

This settlement has now been jeopardized by Barzani’s headlong rush into the provocative referendum. He is cursing the Kurdish troops who abandoned Kirkuk to government forces. He is wrong. This was the real vote by brave fighters who saw no reason to lose their lives defending his hare-brained independence plan.