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The Kurdish question and the fight against Islamic State
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News, May 2015). This led president Barzani to thank the PKK for its help in Makmur
(Van Wilgenburg, August 2014). But almost one-year later high-level KDP officials were
no longer as happy with the PKK, and claimed they were guests (Waarmedia, July 2015).
The Peshmerga war against Islamic State
Initially, when Islamic State carried out a blitzkrieg campaign in June 2014 and captured
the provinces of Mosul, Tikrit and many of the surrounding Sunni areas, as the Iraqi Army
was defeated (ICG 2015: 1), the Kurds did not counterattack IS due to disagreements with
Baghdad. By July, the Iraqi state was practically divided into a Sunni caliphate ruling the
Sunni areas, while Baghdad controlled most of the Shia areas in the South, and Baghdad,
and the Kurds controlled the Kurdish dominated-areas, and secured territories from the
Iraqi army in the disputed provinces of Salahuddin, Kirkuk, and Mosul (
Ibid.
).
However, this does not explain why Islamic State attacked the Iraqi Kurds in August.
While the PUK Peshmergas, with Iranian support, have battled IS in a slowly escalating
battle since June 2014, the KDP has maintained an undeclared truce with IS (Knights,
January 2015: 30). This changed, when IS attacked the Peshmergas of the KDP in August
2014 (Knights, January 2015: 30), resulting in the massacre of the Kurdish religious
minority of Yezidis in Sinjar by IS.
Just as in Syria, the Iraqi Kurdish territories presented a threat to IS control over Mosul,
due to the fact that the Kurds controlled most of the territory around Mosul, including
significant swaths of border areas between Iraq and Syria. Therefore, Islamic State glanced
nervously at the prospect of Baghdad-Erbil agreements (Van Wilgenburg, August 2014).
After a Kurd was once again selected as Iraqi president, Islamic State attacked the Kurds
in August 2014 to secure the stronghold of Mosul, capture more border territories on the
Iraqi-Syrian border, and safeguard Mosul from future attacks.
Islamic State even briefly threatened Erbil, and was only saved when the United States
decided to intervene and launch airstrikes to defend the Kurds in Erbil on August 7, 2014
(Knights, January 2015: 15). Therefore, Islamic State made a strategic mistake by attacking
the Kurds, not expecting that this would lead to more US-support, and even an anti-IS
coalition of 60 countries (Payne, September 2015).
After IS attacked the Kurds in Iraq, US President Obama even approved overt and covert
programs to resupply the Kurdish forces against the jihadist threat (Parkinson & Entous,
September 2014), and a Kurdistan Training Coordination Centre (KTCC) was created by
Western countries that supported the Kurds with training (MacDiarmid, February 2015).
“We intend to stay vigilant, and take action if these terrorist forces threaten our
personnel or facilities anywhere in Iraq, including our consulate in Erbil and our
embassy in Baghdad,” US President Obama said in his speech on August 7, 2014 (White
House, 2014).
Currently, there are 120,000 active Peshmerga forces in Iraq, with rotating
frontline forces estimated at 60,000. There are also 60,000 reserve forces (Gehlen,
2015). Forty thousand of these Peshmerga forces, consisting of 14 brigades, are directly
linked to the Ministry of Peshmerga, while the remainder are directly linked to either