ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—In a worrying development, the Kurdistan Region’s top security official is claiming that the United States is doing nothing to help the Kurds in their fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a terrorist organization that controls much of Iraq including a 1,050-kilometer border with the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region.
"ISIS now has a lot of modern military equipment in their possession, and to fight against them I think the Peshmerga have to be much better equipped than they are," Masrour Barzani, the head of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) National Security Council told Reuters on Saturday. "For that, the United States and the international community as a whole should feel responsible."
"We have had talks with the United States, with some of the European countries,” he added, “but no practical steps have been taken to provide assistance to the KRG especially on the military front.”
If the Syrian civil war is any indication of American willingness to assist anti-ISIS military outfits, then Iraq’s Kurds have little reason to be optimistic.
The war has been raging for three years at the cost of 170,000 lives, and ISIS has secured control of large swaths of the country. Yet US President Barack Obama’s administration has done precious little to uproot ISIS by assisting rebels affiliated with the moderate Syrian National Coalition.
While Obama recently put forward a $500 million “train and equip” package to Congress, senior members of the House Armed Services Committee have indicated the funding won’t clear lawmakers unless the administration lobbies for it.
Adam Smith, a Democrat and the ranking member of the committee who supports the plan, was candid with defense officials. "Sell it, and if you don't, there ain't no way we're going to pass it!" he was quoted as saying.
There are other reasons to believe that Kurdish forces won’t receive support, despite the fact that they were the staunchest ally of the United States in both Gulf wars against Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime.
With an estimated 200,000 soldiers, the Peshmerga is currently the strongest infantry force in Iraq. The United States may fear that strengthening the Kurdish military would further the region’s independence ambitions, alienate American partners in Baghdad, and interrupt the delicate process of forming a new Iraqi government.
The US State Department has made it clear that the priority should be fighting ISIS — but not at the cost of Iraq’s unity.
"A united Iraq is a stronger Iraq and the focus should be on the existential threat that all Iraqis and the people in the region face, which is the threat of (ISIS),” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a press conference earlier this month. “We should not give an opening to a horrific terrorist group by being divided at this critical moment."
The reality on the ground, however, is that Iraq is already divided — quite literally now that ISIS has sliced the country in two, blocking transit routes between Erbil and Baghdad.
Even before Mosul fell on June 10, the country was effectively fractured. Baghdad stopped paying Peshmerga salaries months ago and ignored repeated warnings from Erbil about ISIS activity in the north. It has also withheld the KRG’s budget for the past seven months because of disputes over the Kurdistan Region independently exporting oil to Turkey.
These days, Kurdish forces are armed with outdated weapons, and are essentially fighting ISIS on the cheap. At the same time, the scope of their activity has increased dramatically: they are now tasked with defending a vast new border against a well-trained terrorist group wielding state-of-the-art American military technology that they seized in Mosul.
“This is an emergency, not an everyday crisis, and the caution that characterizes US actions often is inappropriate,” James Jeffrey, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, wrote in remarks prepared for Congress. “The costs of doing nothing significant now are greater than the risks of most actions short of committing ground troops.”
In fact, the US isn’t only “doing nothing”: it is effectively blocking the Peshmerga’s financing. Independent oil exports are the only revenue source for the isolated Kurdistan Region, which is now tasked with funding the Peshmerga. Yet the United States has applied diplomatic pressure to ensure that Kurdish oil is not sold at a volume that could substitute for its allocation of the federal budget.
"Our position has long been that we don't support exports without the appropriate approval of the federal Iraqi government,” Psaki told reporters, “and certainly we do have concerns about the impact of those continuing."
American policymakers have made clear that keeping Iraq together is higher on the list of priorities than containing ISIS. Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, suggests that unity is not a panacea.
“I think everyone is concerned that Iraq may not stay together as a single country,” he told PBS. “But the more serious problem is that having a single country where you have sectarian and ethnic groups that hate each other, that drive people who are in the minority out of their homes or kill them, is not a form of unity. It doesn’t really provide any basis for stability and development.”
If US efforts to keep Iraq together prove successful, it may cost them a dear ally in the region. Many Kurds already feel betrayed by their fickle friend. On June 3, Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani assured the Kurdish Parliament that the international community would accept a bid for independence following a referendum.
“Those who do not support us do not oppose us,” he said.
When Al-Jazeera asked him about talks with the US two weeks later, he replied, “We hope that those who do not support us do not become our enemies,” he said.
