Iraqi Kurds have no worse enemies than themselves

Michael Rubin | American Enterprise Institute

Iraqi Kurds Deserve Better

The Kurds often quip they have “no friends but the mountains,” an allusion to how both neighbors and great powers victimize them. This may be true, but they might also say the Kurds have no worse enemies than themselves. Throughout the centuries, adversaries have sought to divide and conquer.

Kurds may blame outsiders for their misfortune, but their leaders willingly allowed their own cooption, often sacrificing principle for personal power or fortune.

Consider the case of Massoud Barzani. In 1996, just eight years after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein massacred thousands of Barzani’s tribesmen and just five years after the Kurdistan Regional Government formed under the protection of U.S., British, and French aircraft, Barzani invited Saddam’s elite Republican Guards into the Kurdish capital Erbil. Barzani cared little for the Kurds whom Saddam might arrest and torture, or the Kurdish girls he might kidnap and provide as gifts to other Arab regimes. Barzani’s justification? He feared losing his grip to rival Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani.

While Kurdish officials and their lobbyists like to describe the region as democratic, any semblance of democracy melts away. With the Kurdistan Regional Government’s initial election nearly a draw, the Barzanis’ Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Talabanis’ Patriotic Union of Kurdistan decided to split the spoils between them.

Barzani and Talabani, both penniless but for the largesse of their sponsors during exile, quickly became billionaires. Their party machines became tools to dispense patronage: Every Kurdistan Democratic Party governor or minister had a Patriotic Union of Kurdistan deputy and vice versa.

This worked well until the Barzanis began to cheat and siphon off revenue from the Ibrahim Khalil/Habur border crossing, at the time the region’s most valuable resource. During the 1994-1997 Kurdish civil war, the two parties essentially divided their region into two family fiefdoms.

Everything duplicated: Two governments, two prime ministers, two cabinets, and two peshmergas. U.S. efforts to reunite the government are now almost a quarter century old, and its efforts to unite the two militias almost as long.

It will never work. As the generations change from Massoud to son Masrour and nephew Nechirvan and even Masrour’s son Areen on the Barzani side and Jalal to sons Bafel and Qubad on the Talabani side, the Kurds appear more inclined to repeat mistakes than rectify them.

Whereas once Massoud allied with Saddam to preserve his power, today Masrour fulfills a devil’s bargain with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the same ends. He provides intelligence to Turkish warplanes to bomb his rivals and allows Turkish intelligence to conduct surveillance and run operations from Erbil.

The Talabanis also repeat history. Jalal long flirted with Iran and guided policy beyond the cordiality that might be necessary given Iran’s proximity to Patriotic Union of Kurdistan territory. So too does Bafel go too far when he eulogizes late Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. “It is with deep sorrow that we have received the news of the martyrdom of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah,” he wrote.

“While extending our condolences to the families of the martyrs, the Lebanese people, Muslims and friends of the martyrs for this great suffering… we call on the international community to play its legal and humanitarian role to stop this bloodshed and aggression against Palestine, Lebanon and the region.”

This is reminiscent of the own-goal when the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan representative in Tehran, shortly after President Barack Obama took office, declared, that “U.S. occupiers” should “leave Iraq quickly.” In both cases, perhaps a more neutral option would have been silence.

The prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan region Masrour Barzani (L) and his eldest son Areen Masrour Barzani, UK, January 2024. Photo: Barzani’s Press Office/X/via iKurd.net

Meanwhile, as Massoud and Jalal passed the torch, corruption worsened and any semblance of democracy evaporated. Masrour does not seek to transform Kurdistan into a viable state or even into Dubai version 2.0, but rather into Masrouristan, in which he has ultimate control and a personality cult on par with President Isaias Afwerki in Eritrea. Space for religious and ethnic minorities has also declined as the Barzanis especially treat Yezidis and Christians as museum exhibits rather than vibrant communities.

The current parliamentary campaign is a farce. Both parties compete in a vacuum, and their vanity media ignores competitors. If Masrour were a mature leader with self-confidence in his own abilities, he would not forbid his media from covering Bafel Talabani’s speeches or vice versa. Alas, freedom of the press is in shambles; ironically, the situation is far worse in Erbil than in Baghdad.

Indeed, Orwell is alive and well in Erbil. Consider the recent Kurdistan Victims Fund vs. the Kurdistan Regional Government court case that is now before the Washington, DC District Court: Barzani media report the judge dismissed the case. Actually, the opposite happened.

Barzanis’ lawyers demanded he dismiss the case; the judge refused. The plaintiffs may withdraw and refile to include new banking information from dissident Barzani family members and lawyers of those defendants who flipped on the Barzanis since June.

The tragedy of Iraq under Saddam Hussein was not only that his mismanagement stopped Iraqi progress but that while Iraq was frozen in time, the world also accelerated in ways ordinary Iraqis did not conceive until they saw how far behind they had fallen.

While Masrour’s, Nechirvan’s, Bafel’s, and Qubad’s media create a bubble and lie outright about their economy and their diplomatic position, ordinary Kurds know how bad their governance has become which is why so many now flee, risking their life to cross Belarussian forests and the English channel, rather than stay in Erbil or Sulaimani.

The Iraqi Kurdish leaders may believe they are indispensable to Washington, but they are wrong. The Kurdish leaders will soon discover that neither foreign nor military aid are entitlements. Just ask the Turks: Reality matters more than lobbyist spin in Washington. Kurds must reform, rise up, or fail.

Michael Rubin is a former Pentagon official whose major research areas are the Middle East, Turkey, Iran and diplomacy. He is author of “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes” (Encounter, 2014). He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute AEI. His major research area is the Middle East, with special focus on Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Kurdish society.

The article first published at aei.org

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.