Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi warned the independence of Iraq's Kurdish region would be "catastrophic" and cause the Middle East to splinter along ethnic and religious lines, newspapers reported Monday. A Sunni militant offensive that drove soldiers out of **rthern Iraq last month has emboldened leaders of the country's three-province Kurdish region to push for an independence referendum. "The referendum currently demanded by Kurds is **thing... but the catastrophic beginning of the division of Iraq into small rival states, starting with a Kurdish state that will grow to include lands in Syria on which Kurds are living," Sisi told Egyptian newspapers.