“The most crucial, and potentially the most trying, period of Kurdish history lay in the weeks and months ahead as the KRG hold an independence referendum scheduled for September 25th.”
In early 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), born from the irreconcilable remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and brought to maturation through the brutal Syrian civil war, swept into al-Anbar, its precursors strong hold. In response, the Iraqi Army (IA) redeployed forces to bolster its units in al-Anbar, leaving Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, largely open for the taking.
ISIL attacked Mosul in early June 2014, and within a week the city was under ISIL’s uncontested control. In the face of a numerically inferior force, with little more than medium to heavy machine guns and mortars, the well-equipped IA fled. This left ISIL with the city as well vast amounts of U.S. and Western supplied military hardware. ISIL looted the city’s banks, enriching themselves with Iraqi Dinar, and imposed their strict salafist interpretation of Islam on the city’s remaining residents.
65 kilometers east, in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the Kurds saw a legitimately existential threat driving the stream of refugees that began fleeing Mosul for the safety of the Peshmerga protected and U.S. backed KRG.
As could have been easily predicted, ISIL sought to extend further eastward into Kurdish territory. Whether it was due to what they believed was their divine mandate to cleanse the earth of non-believers, or the fact they were bolstered by how quickly the IA abandoned Mosul, ISIL severely underestimated the capability, effectiveness, and resiliency of the Peshmerga.
When ISIL met the Peshmerga at the frontier of the KRG they were handily repelled. Unlike the IA, which was largely led by Shia commanders in Mosul, a largely Sunni city, the Peshmerga were fighting for their homeland. It was their families, their history, their land, which they had been fighting for decades and centuries to free from outside oppression, that motivated them, not the abstract concept of a nation-state they had not fully bought into. They had a reason to fight.
While ISIL was turned back at the Kurdistan berm they sought to gain territory elsewhere for their newly proclaimed caliphate. Their actions at Sinjar, a Kurdish mountain enclave in northwestern Iraq, were especially brutal, and seemed a punitive measure for the Kurds’ staunch resistance to their advance.
The Kurds of Sinjar are primarily Yezidi, a religion separate and distinct from the Abrahamic faiths, but with a theology that would seem familiar in its explanation for the genesis of earth and man and moral expectations. ISIL’s actions at Sinjar in August 2014 involved the slaughter of men and the wholesale abduction of women and children to be sold into slavery. For the women and young girls, the brutality of sexual slavery is shocking reality. The young boys were told their religion was a lie, indoctrinated into Islam, and forced into armed service by their ISIL captors.
Those who escaped the ISIL advance at the base of the mountain fled and took refuge on the mountain, something that had become familiar to Kurds throughout their long and turbulent history of escaping oppression. However, they were not prepared to flee to the mountains, many left with only what they had or could carry in their hands or on their backs. Food, water, and medicine were scarce. The massacre that happened at the villages below looked to be repeated against the starving and dehydrated above.
The suffering of the Yezidis on Mount Sinjar garnered global attention, with reporters riding in helicopters carrying aid to show the plight of those trapped on the mountain. A female Yezidi member of Iraq’s parliament, Vian Dakhil, took to the microphone and gave an emotional appeal to help her fellow Yezidis who were trapped on Mount Sinjar.
The carnage at Sinjar and the potential for a humanitarian catastrophe on the mountain were contributing factors in President Obama’s decision to finally take offensive action against ISIL. Members of the U.S. armed forces landed on Mount Sinjar and planned for the evacuation of those trapped.
In November 2015, Sinjar was retaken by the Kurds as part of a joint-operation between the KRG based Peshmerga, the Turkish based Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), and the Syrian based Peoples Protection Units (YPG) of the Rojava Kurds, with the support of U.S. and other Western allies.
The Peshmerga bulwark against ISIL’s advance eastward in 2014 forced ISIL to follow the path of least resistance, advancing south along the perimeter of the KRG, eventually taking Kirkuk — a traditionally Kurdish city that was also surrounded by a number of oil fields but was “Arabized” under Saddam.
After ISIL initially took Kirkuk, the Peshmerga planned to retake the city and after recapturing the city in June 2015, the Peshmerga remained. By tying Kirkuk back in with the KRG, the Kurds in effect reversed the Arabization policy, which caused concern in Baghdad, as well as Iran and Turkey. They viewed the inclusion of Kirkuk, and the oil fields around it, as being a central piece to the economy of a future Kurdish state.
In addition to Kirkuk, the fight against ISIL has allowed the Kurds to expand in Nineveh Province, primarily north and east of Mosul, and further west to the Syrian border, which connects the Iraqi Kurds and the Syrian Rojava Kurds. Expansion has also occurred to a lesser extent south from the traditional KRG borders.
The history of Iraqi Kurdistan is not complete. Most of the ink is not even dry. The most crucial, and potentially the most trying, period of Kurdish history lay in the weeks and months ahead as the KRG hold an independence referendum scheduled for September 25th. The reaction of regional and global powers to what the KRG does after the referendum will also be crucial.
“Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” and its acronym, “ISIL,” is used rather than “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” and its acronym, “ISIS,” because Levant is a better translation of the groups Arabic name, dawlat al-islamiyah fe iraq wah al shams, with al-Shams referring to what is historically “Greater Syria,” which in common English usage is referred to as “the Levant.” At this time, however, it is a moot point, as they have dropped “fe iraq wah al shams” and are now simply “the Islamic State.”
