The 2010s: A bad decade for Kurdistan

As the 2010s come to a close, it is clear looking back that it was for the most part a very tough decade for the Kurdistan Region and its people.

Kurdistan was not directly affected by the Arab Spring that swept large parts of the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. 

However, there were concurrent protests that year against corruption and nepotism in the region, primarily in Sulaimani. Scores were injured in clashes with the security forces. The protests ended after less than three months. 

The early 2010s showed signs that a promising decade lay ahead. 

In an unprecedented move, then-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Erbil, the first Turkish leader ever to do so, in March 2011. Erdogan joined then-President Masoud Barzani in officially inaugurating Erbil International Airport and opening the Turkish consulate in the Kurdish capital.

Increased trade with Turkey helped fund an economic boom in Kurdistan. The skyline of Erbil rapidly changed with the construction of several high-rises, luxury hotels, and large Western-style shopping malls. Talk of Erbil becoming a “new Dubai” pre-2014 was not uncommon. 

Journalist Amberin Zaman once aptly summed up this period by pointing out that “media coverage of Iraq’s Kurds was no longer about their misery, but instead about their stellar success”.   

In 2012, relations between Masoud Barzani and Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki continued to deteriorate. Barzani urged the United States not to sell Iraq F-16 fighter-bombers, fearing Maliki might use them against Kurdistan. 

He had reason to worry. Maliki had told his generals he might one day order the Iraqi Army to capture Erbil once he took delivery of those jets. 

During that year, there were several tense standoffs between the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Iraqi Army. The former prevented the latter from deploying to the Fish Khabur border crossing. Maliki insisted the Iraqi Army had the right to any part of Kurdistan it desired. He also sought to extend direct federal command and control over the Peshmerga.

Tensions escalated further when Maliki established the Tigris Operations Command, ostensibly to deal with security issues in Kirkuk and other disputed Kurdistani territories. The two sides remained locked in a standoff until April 2013, when the Iraqi military withdrew several forces from Kirkuk to combat Sunni protests in Anbar. 

The worst year of the last decade for the Kurdistan Region, and Iraq too, was certainly 2014.  

In February, when Kurdistan began independently exporting oil, Maliki blocked the 17 percent of the federal budget constitutionally allocated to Kurdistan. A crippling financial crisis ensued in the region since many Kurds are employed by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and rely on it for their salaries. 

In June that year, the Islamic State (ISIS) group swiftly captured Iraq’s second city Mosul. It then declared the establishment of a caliphate over vast swathes of both Iraq and neighbouring Syria. The Iraqi Army melted away. It also abandoned Kirkuk. The Peshmerga rapidly deployed forces to secure the oil-rich region and prevented it from falling under ISIS control. 

Hundreds-of-thousands of Iraqi Arabs displaced by the ISIS takeover fled into the Kurdistan Region seeking sanctuary. 

In August, ISIS attacked Kurdistan. It subjected the Yezidis in Shingal to a horrific genocide, infamously kidnapping and gang-raping Yezidi women and girls and executing thousands of Yezidi men and boys. The group also advanced on Erbil and came dangerously close to entering the Kurdish capital. 

The US then intervened and declared war on ISIS, vowing to eradicate the caliphate. The Peshmerga gradually rebounded with US support and repelled numerous ISIS attacks on the region across a lengthy 1,000-kilometre front.

In September, under US pressure, Maliki resigned. Haider al-Abadi became prime minister of Iraq. With Maliki gone, there were hopes that relations between Baghdad and Erbil would improve as both were now fighting a common enemy.

In January 2015, Peshmerga forces helped the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) repel the brutal siege of Kobane by ISIS. They were allowed to cross through Turkey to the besieged border city with their heavy weaponry and returned home soon after ISIS was pushed back. 

Throughout the ISIS war, the Peshmerga fought with much less sophisticated weaponry than the Iraqi Army. While Iraq had American-made M1A1 main battle tanks, modern Russian helicopter gunships, and soon after that a fleet of F-16s, the Peshmerga had to mostly make do with Kalashnikovs, RPGs and antiquated T-55 tanks leftover from Saddam Hussein’s old army. 

To add insult to injury, many weapons ISIS used against them had been left behind by the Iraqi Army when it fled Mosul, including 2,400 Humvees. 

The US-led anti-ISIS coalition did supply the Kurds with some weapons. Germany provided thousands of G-36 rifles and Milan anti-tank missiles to the Peshmerga to help them stop armoured ISIS vehicle-borne explosive devices (VBIEDs) that posed a serious threat to their front-line positions. 

The US also supplied the Peshmerga with light weapons and a couple of mine resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicles. Some of the MRAPs, however, arrived in Erbil without their protective side armour, rendering them little more than death traps. 

Washington’s staunch adherence to the so-called ‘One Iraq’ policy meant most weapons it supplied the Peshmerga were first sent through Baghdad rather than directly to Erbil, much to the consternation of Kurds. 

In November 2015, the Peshmerga liberated Shingal with coalition air support. Months of fighting had left the city a battered, largely uninhabitable ruin. Also, many Yezidis remained missing. Tens-of-thousands lived, and still live, in internally displaced person (IDP) camps in the Kurdistan Region. Others left the region altogether to begin new lives in Europe and elsewhere. 

In early 2016, the Peshmerga permitted Iraqi Army forces to cross through its lines in Makhmour in preparation for the long-anticipated operation to liberate Mosul. After a series of setbacks the operation to recapture the city began in October 2016. For a brief moment, the Peshmerga and the Iraqi Army coordinated their offensives around the city in a move hailed as historic. 

Shortly after the launch of the Mosul offensive, ISIS carried out a deadly attack by infiltrating Kirkuk city but was quickly foiled by the Peshmerga and armed residents.  

Ultimately, aside from capturing and securing swathes of the Nineveh Plains from ISIS, the Kurdistan Region decided against having the Peshmerga participate in the Battle for Mosul. The Iraqi Army engaged in a bloody and ferocious urban warfare campaign against the entrenched militants in the city that lasted until July 2017. 

Masoud Barzani had repeatedly insisted on holding an independence referendum since the rise of ISIS.

In July 2017, the same month Mosul was liberated, Barzani announced that Kurds would vote on whether or not they wanted independence from Iraq on September 25, 2017. 

Initially, Abadi dismissed the announcement, saying his government would ignore the referendum rather than send tanks into Kurdistan. 

The US also opposed the vote. Barzani invariably declared that if the Americans or the international community offered an alternative date, he would consider postponing. They didn’t, so he went ahead.

On September 25, Kurds voted overwhelmingly, by just under 93 percent, in favour of independence. Kurds cast their votes in an orderly fashion, even in disputed Kurdistani regions such as Kirkuk. 

The reaction from the outside world, however, was swift and unrelenting. Iraq closed Kurdistan’s airspace. Iran closed its border with the region. Erdogan threatened to stop importing Kurdish oil but ultimately did nothing beyond bitterly denouncing the vote. 

Abadi demanded the Kurdistan Region surrender control of its airports and international border crossings. Aside from opposing the referendum, his rhetoric suggested he sought the complete dismantling of Kurdistan’s autonomy. 

The KRG slammed the flight ban as “a collective punishment against the people of Kurdistan”.

The leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) Jalal Talabani passed away on October 3 aged 83. He had suffered a stroke in 2012 and had been largely incapacitated and out of the public eye since.  

Then the so-called ‘October events’ transpired. A year to the month after the “historic” cooperation between the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga, the two briefly fought one another. 

On October 16, Iraqi forces entered Kirkuk. The Peshmerga promptly withdrew. By the end of the day, the Iraqi flag once again flew over the city. Iraq’s military action displaced more than 100,000 Kurds in the region. 

Kurds were further humiliated when, during an October 17 press conference, the head of Kirkuk’s police, a Kurd, was infamously prevented from speaking his native tongue. 

Allegations of betrayal and even treason were promptly levelled against elements of the PUK leadership in the wake of the Peshmerga withdrawal.

The former PUK governor of Kirkuk, Najmaldin Karim, who had to flee the city after being warned that Iranian-backed militias were coming to either capture or kill him, charged that factions within the PUK made a deal with Baghdad, sponsored by Iran, to surrender the entire province.

The next day the Peshmerga also withdrew from Shingal ahead of an Iraqi takeover. Then, Iraqi state-sanctioned Shiite-majority Hashd al-Shaabi paramilitaries began clashing with the Peshmerga on the Kurdistan Region’s frontiers. The Peshmerga killed several of them and successfully destroyed an American-built M1A1 tank in their possession. 

The clashes ended in a ceasefire on October 27. The ‘October events’ undoubtedly constituted the lowest-point in post-2003 relations between Baghdad and Erbil. 

Masoud Barzani stepped down as president at the end of October after serving 12 years in office. 

The flight ban lasted until March 2018. Aside from losing the disputed territories with Iraq, Kurdistan retained its autonomy throughout the crisis. 

Abadi’s list performed poorly in the May 2018 Iraqi parliamentary election. In October, Adil Abdul-Mahdi became prime minister of Iraq. Erbil welcomed this development since it viewed Abdul-Mahdi as a more favourable candidate for resolving issues than his two predecessors. 

Masoud Barzani visited Baghdad the following month and had cordial meetings with Abdul-Mahdi and several prominent Iraqi officials. 

It seemed a new page had turned. 

Throughout the past year, one major issue between Baghdad and Erbil was the reimplementation of the federal budget. Abadi’s government had sought to reduce it from 17 to 12.6 percent, arguing that the latter figure more accurately reflected Kurdistan’s portion of Iraq’s population. 

Abdul-Mahdi proved much more conciliatory and resumed sending Kurdistan a portion of the federal budget. Erbil, in turn, was supposed to send 250,000 barrels of oil per day to SOMO, Iraq’s state oil marketing company, but failed to meet its end of the bargain, arguing it should face leniency since it hadn’t received its share of the budget for years. 

By the years-end, Erbil reached a deal with Baghdad and promised it would send those 250,000 barrels in return for a portion of the 2020 federal budget.  

Under Abdul-Mahdi’s government, the Kurdistan Region was also able to continue independently exporting its oil without facing significant scrutiny. Nevertheless, many officials in Iraq charged Abdul-Mahdi with being too soft on the Kurds. Now that he is resigning in response to the violent repression of protests in Baghdad and southern provinces, it is unclear whether his successor will retain cordial relations with Kurdistan. 

Also, there are presently worries in Kurdistan over demands for amendments to Iraq’s constitution by the widespread protest movement currently gripping Iraq. Kurds fear this will undermine Kurdistan’s hard-won autonomy, which is enshrined by the Iraqi constitution. 

Going forward it is unclear what the 2020s will have in store for the Kurdistan Region. If this harsh decade is any indicator, however, the region will likely persevere in the face of any more significant challenges in the coming decade.