The Enemy Of My Enemy Is...My Enemy

After battling islamic state, the iraqis and the Kurds are now at odds—with oil at stake

- Donna Abu-Nasr, Anthony Dipaola, & Khalid

In 2014, when Islamic State rushed into northern Iraq, the region’s rival factions and their international backers turned their attention to defeating the extremists despite old rivalries, sectarian divisions, and differing agendas. Three years later, as Islamic State nears defeat, having been expelled from its stronghold of Mosul and its self- proclaimed capital of Raqqa, many of those old rivalries and unaddressed grievances have burst back to the fore, threatening to further destabilise an already fractious region. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the disputed city of Kirkuk, where Iraqi federal forces loyal to the central government in Baghdad faced down Kurdish fighters for control over Iraq’s oldest producing oil field, named Baba Gurgur, or Father of Fire, by the Kurds in 1927. The long-standing struggle between the government in Baghdad and the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) reignited on 16 October as Iraqi tanks entered the outskirts of the city of more than 1 million people.