There is no doubt that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)-led Sunni insurgency in Iraq has paved the way for the Kurds to implement a long-delayed objective, namely to annex the disputed territories to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The Kurdish political leadership has managed to benefit from deepening regional chaos, once again at the expense of a failing state that retreated from its third largest city in less than 24 hours. The Kurdish success has come at a point when neither the Western giants, nor the Iraqi government itself, could oppose the KRG’s bold expansionism. Kurdish military maneuvers through the disputed territories have raised the question of how the Kurdish government will ensure the security of the newly incorporated areas. This is particularly salient after an article was published by respected American military experts in the Wall Street Journal, which called on the US to intervene surgically in the brand new Iraqi civil war. This is indicative of the way that the Kurdish capacity to fight a never-ending war has turned into a lively debate among experts on Kurdish and Iraqi politics.
The KRG’s military capacity to fight a war with an ISIS-led state-like entity centered in Mosul and Anbar has definitely been proven by the KRG’s effective deterrence in stopping ISIS from attacking Kurdistan. However, whether the current experience may be used as a barometer for all potential scenarios is as yet unclear. The KRG has been faced with a strictly targeted and short battle, whose primary objective was to increase pressure on the city of Baghdad immediately after capturing Mosul. In this way, ISIS hoped to gain a credible bargaining chip against the Iraqi state.
ISIS’s strategy has successfully forced the Iraqi state to focus on the security of the capital, thus creating a functional space and earning time for the organization to settle into Mosul. As such, ISIS and its tribal and ex-Baathist allies are not expected to decrease the threat they pose to Baghdad until the organization successfully applies the Raqqa model to Mosul, which entails the assumption of complete de facto control by a self-proclaimed ISIS government. Any potential KRG-ISIS war, therefore, may not entirely materialize until Baghdad gives in to the insurgents in some parts of its Sunni enclave. Such a decision would largely mirror that of the government of Bashar al-Assad in 2013 in Raqqa and several other Sunni areas of Syria.
ISIS is no less politically rational than the states it has been battling, including the KRG. Without such a well-established rationality, the organization would not have avoided a battle with the KRG, where Peshmerga and ISIS fighters stood almost literally toe-to-toe after the capture of Mosul. Though the prospect of fighting a completely hostile Kurdish population was certainly a deterrent, ISIS's decision to proceed into central Iraq was motivated largely from its experience in Syria; it was aware that its rule over Mosul could not be consolidated without significantly threatening the national capital.
Such state-level rationality may well see ISIS unexpectedly turning its attention from Baghdad, in order to decrease the Iraqi military’s pressure on its fighters and to again gain time. The significant and inevitable ISIS threat to the KRG will thus begin when the Iraqi government chooses to manage the crisis, instead of ending it, in order to protect the stability of Baghdad. No doubt the Iraqi government has learned lessons from Bashar al-Assad’s strategy to keep Damascus stable at the expense of the rest of the country.
The KRG’s military capacity has not been fully tested at this time, while ISIS has a clear strategy of pressuring Baghdad, in order to secure its foothold in northern Iraq. In light of the strategies adopted by the various sides in Syria, Iraq may even be able to temporarily de-escalate what has become a full-fledged war, in favor of carefully selected skirmishes. Such an Iraqi decision, indeed, depends on two decisive factors: the fate of US military aid; and Iran’s paramilitary capacity to carve out a northward path for the Iraqi military.
In the event of Iraq’s decision to sacrifice Mosul for the sake of Baghdad’s security, the KRG is likely to continue sharing a long porous border with a highly dynamic organization that makes a living from continuous fighting. The Kurdish military capacity to fight a battle that has partially defeated Syria and Iraq will only be fully tested when ISIS and the KRG remain alone in northern Iraq.
Ceng Sagnic is a junior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies in Tel Aviv, Israel
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