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Haunted by their past: Kurds and the Islamic State

After sweeping victories in Syria and Iraq in June and July 2014 that brought them ever closer to Baghdad, the Islamic State suddenly changed course in August, turning east toward Iraq’s Kurdish region. The Kurds were taken by surprise. In the resulting scramble, the peshmergas retreated ahead of the snowballing, rapid advance of the jihadists, […]

Hoshang Waziri and Lydia Wilson write for the CTC Sentinel:

After sweeping victories in Syria and Iraq in June and July 2014 that brought them ever closer to Baghdad, the Islamic State suddenly changed course in August, turning east toward Iraq’s Kurdish region. The Kurds were taken by surprise. In the resulting scramble, the peshmergas retreated ahead of the snowballing, rapid advance of the jihadists, leaving tens of thousands of Yazidis around Sinjar and Christians in the Nineveh plains to flee or be captured. Islamic State forces eventually swept through the Makhmour and Gwer regions, reaching within 20 kilometers of the Kurdish capital, Erbil.

Two things were clear at that point: the Kurds were not prepared to face such a serious military offensive, nor had they seen it coming. Apart from some involvement in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Iraqi Kurds had not used arms collectively and intensively since the brutal civil war of the 1990s known in Kurdish memory as the brakujie (Brother Killings). What was less obvious was that the divisions that had driven the violence 20 years ago have also been reawakened. The jihadists’ assault has revived the rivalry between the two main political parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP, led by the Kurdish President Masoud Barzani) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK, led by Jalal Talabani), and their respective military wings. The renewed enmity is deepening internal Kurdish divisions and swelling the territorial ambitions of each side.