While the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) violently debates its legitimacy with the entire world, many U.S. presidential candidates debate the best course of action to quell the violence of the start-up caliphate. Suggestions from both parties have varied, from boots-on-the-ground involvement to no-fly zones, as this contentious issue spawns further debate about Syrian refugee management and a desperate diaspora flees across the world.
A quite popular proposal is to arm the Kurds, members of an ethnic group in the Middle East that inhabit the autonomous nation of Kurdistan. However, both historical precedent and the Kurds’ evident devotion to their own interests make it unclear if providing the Kurds with so much support—especially commodified support in the form of weapons—is a good idea.
Note that the term ‘nation’ is distinct from the term ‘state’ in international relations. The Kurds do not have politically defined, universally recognized borders, and instead occupy a region in the Middle East that roughly encompasses Southeastern Turkey, Northern Iraq and Syria, and Western Iran. This is the autonomous ‘nation’ of Kurdistan, and it contains the majority of the worldwide Kurdish population.
Even though the Kurds have de facto control over several large cities, with a regional capital in the Iraqi city of Erbil, several political parties, and a regional president in Masoud Barzani, they only espouse 13 foreign relations offices worldwide, albeit a growing number.
The contiguous territory they do have under control has been a long time coming. In recent history, the Kurds have been in near constant, ethnically-driven conflict with Middle Eastern neighbors, most notably Iraq.
The Kurds’ relationship with the U.S., however, has been far from consistent. In the 1970s, the Kurds’ guerilla warfare tactics were helpful to the U.S.’s attempts to overthrow the Ba’athist regime of Iraq, which incidentally proved unsuccessful. Relations with the Kurds were then terminated, and in 1988 they suffered a devastating genocide under the al-Anfal campaign as the Iran-Iraq War came to a close. It is estimated that the Sadam Hussein-led Ba’athists killed over 100,000 Kurds during this offensive, using chemical attacks, aerial bombardment, and other heinous acts of aggression.
Decades later, the Kurds face an entirely new threat in the form of the Islamic State. ISIS has gained considerable territory just since 2014 – taking large, important Iraqi cities like Mosul and Ramadi, as well as Raqqa in Syria, ISIS’s proclaimed capital – and is still battling for Syria’s Aleppo. These holdings encroach on Kurdistan, and ISIS has treated the Kurds with depravity similar to that of the Ba’athists during their reign over the region.
The Kurds have not merely rolled over to ISIS’s advances, however. On the contrary, in November 2015 the elite Kurdish fighting force known as the Peshmerga successfully expelled ISIS from the Northern Iraqi city of Sinjar, ending in just under 48 hours the horrific enslavement, rape, and murder that the city of 90,000 endured while under ISIS control.
It is a fact that the Kurds have become one of the most elite fighting forces in the Middle East since the Iraqi Army has proven ineffective in stopping ISIS’s advances. Their storied female fighters are a regional phenomenon and the entire Peshmerga has been sharpened by years of fighting for the right of the Kurds to remain established in the region.
This effectiveness is the cause of renewed interest in the Kurds as the U.S. and its allies turn to face the cancerous growth of the Islamic State. In fact, the aforementioned recapture of Sinjar was aided by U.S. airstrikes, and is just one example of the military cooperation of the U.S. and the Kurds against ISIS.
However, there is evidence to suggest that the Kurds are not interested in the U.S.’s stated foreign policy goal of eliminating ISIS from the region completely.
Sinjar is a city inhabited primarily by Yazidis, who practice a religion originating not from Sunni Islam like ISIS and the Kurds, but of ancient Mesopotamian religions like Zoroastrianism. The city was nonetheless attractive to the Kurds because Yazidis speak Kurdish, and therefore their survival is vital to the preservation of Kurdish culture. In their attack on Sinjar, the Kurds completely cut off highway access from Mosul, an important victory for the Peshmerga.
Many in the U.S. thus see the next step for the Kurds as leading a charge attacking Mosul, expelling ISIS, and continuing the forward progression, but these sentiments are only somewhat shared by Kurdish officers; a Kurdish official told The New Yorker that “we are happy to support an offensive to retake Mosul, but we won’t lead it.”
This is a decision made after undoubtedly examining the expected utility of attacking Mosul. Unlike Sinjar, Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, is majority Arab, and if the Kurds were to attempt an insurgency to retake the city, they would face not only fierce military opposition, but loud popular opposition as well. Therefore, their hesitation to lead the charge is evidence of their own personal interests: preserving Kurdish territories first, and eliminating ISIS altogether from the region as a possible distant second.
If this remains true, it may be unwise for the presidential candidates to place so much trust in the Kurds when it isn’t certain that their regional interests line up completely with ours, especially regarding arming them with U.S. weapons. Similar practices took place under Operation Cyclone, the largest covert CIA operation in U.S. history, in which the Afghan mujahideen was financed and armed in order to bolster their effectiveness during the Soviet War in Afghanistan from 1979-1988. The aftermath of this operation led to today’s infamous argument against giving military aid to rebel groups: the Taliban insurgency, which currently has a haven in Afghanistan, is fighting with U.S. weapons from Operation Cyclone. This problematic and somewhat embarrassing situation could just as likely repeat itself if the U.S. is uncertain that the Kurds are completely devoted not only to their cause, but to their alliance.
If the U.S. wants a strong regional ally to project power into the Middle East, they should look elsewhere, perhaps to the lukewarm trading partner of Saudi Arabia. At the very least, the US should not invest all of its trust in one Kurdish force.