Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)

Iraq's 2005 Constitution recognises an autonomous Kurdistan region in the north of the country, run by the Kurdistan Regional Government.

This was the outcome of decades of political and military efforts to secure self-rule by the Kurdish minority, who are estimated to number more than 6 million and make up between 17% and 20% of the population of Iraq. The Kurdish people and their identity has long  been defined and born out of oppression and resistance.

A people without their own country

The Kurds are a distinct ethnic and linguistic group, an indigenous people of the Mesopotamian plains and highlands. Their language is a west Iranian language related to Persian and Pashto. Their traditional way of life before World War 1 was principally nomadic and revolved around sheep and goat herding throughout the plains of what now constitutes Iraq, and the highlands of Turkey and Iran.

The enforcement of national boundaries after World War 1 impeded the seasonal migrations of their flocks and dramatically changed their way of life. It also divided up what had been a largely ill-defined region of the Ottoman Empire into areas of the new countries created by the victorious great powers, mainly Britain and France. This left the Kurds with minority status within their respective countries. It also forced them to engage in village life and settled farming. The Kurds adhere to a number of differing creeds and religions, but the majority are Sunni Muslims. They constitute the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East.

Areas in the Middle East predominantly occupied by Kurds include south east Turkey, south-western Armenia, north east Syria, western Iran and northern Iraq. When most of these countries attained statehood after the war following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, particularly in the case of Iraq, Syria and Turkey, the Kurds remained as significant minorities in these new nations. (Armenia was absorbed by the Soviet Union in 1920 and Iran, partly occupied in the war by several of its belligerents, regained its independence in 1921.)

During their long history in the region, the Kurds have attempted intermittent independence in various regions of their homelands, but inevitably came under the hegemony of a series of empires  including the Mongols, Saffavids and lastly the Ottomans.

The Treaty of Sevres

In 1920, the Kurds believed they believed they would achieve independence when the defeated Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Sevres which provided for a Kurdish state, subject to the agreement of the League of Nations. However, in the following years, the Kurds were to experience betrayal, oppression, and genocide. The Kurds have never obtained a permanent nation state and are often said to be the largest ethnic group without their own nation.

Only the Kurds of Iraq have their own autonomous regional government.

Victims of genocide

Genocidal events such as the so-called "Anfal campaign" of the 1980s in which Saddam Hussein’s forces killed between 50,000 and 182,000 Kurds, have become an important constitutive element of Kurdish national identity. This was reinforced even more by Saddam Hussein's brutal chemical gas attack against the Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988, which killed up to 5,000 people and injured many more. 

Noisy neighbours

Only in Iraq have the Kurds managed to set up a stable government of their own in recent times, albeit within a federal state. Major problems remain, nonetheless. The Iraqi landlocked Kurdistan Region is surrounded by powerful neighbours Turkey and Iran, as well as war-torn Syria - all of which have Kurdish populations of their own. It is also in dispute with the Iraqi government over several territories in northern Iraq, in particular the historic and oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

Inter-Kurdistan tensions

Tensions between the main Kurdish political parties - the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party - have erupted into a civil war in the past, conflicts that almost destroyed the autonomous government in the late nineties.  Some differences remain.

Independence attempts

The Kurds made their last attempt at independence in September 2017 when they held an independence referendum in the face of much international opposition. More than 90% of electors voted for independence but it helped provoke a backlash from the Iraqi government which invaded northern Iraq and took back several vital cities and towns from the Kurds, including oil-rich Kirkuk. Later the same year, the KRG accepted a ruling from Iraq's Supreme Court stating that no province could secede from Iraq.

The fight against Islamic State

The Kurds of Iraq, and Syria, played a key role in the containment and defeat of the Islamic State group (2014-2017). IS posed an existential threat to the Kurds and others  of the varying ethnicities and religions they considered to be apostates. From 2014, IS militants committed acts of genocide in north-western Iraq against the Yazidis, the majority of whom speak Kurdish and consider themselves to be ethnically Kurdish.

IS militants slaughtered thousands of Yazidis, compelled others to convert to its extreme brand of Sunni Islam and forced thousands of women to become their sex slaves and "wives".

In July 2014, IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the establishment of his so-called caliphate from the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Iraq's second city of Mosul before making a determined attack on the Kurdistan Region. The Peshmerga thwarted a determined IS assault on Kirkuk and played important roles in key battles such as those for Kobani in Syria - alongside their Syrian brothers and sisters - and the predominantly Yazidi town of Sinja. The Peshmerga were again in action in the vital battle to retake Mosul from IS, which ended in victory for the allies in July 2017.