![]() It was also during this time that the group attracted the attentions of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the eventual founder of al Qaeda in Iraq. By 2001, it had been renamed Ansar al-Islam and began receiving assistance from al Qaeda. The biggest of these was Jund al-Islam, which in the late 1990s began establishing militant and ideological training camps in the Halabja region in the hope of preparing the ground for a Salafi-jihadi revolution in Iraq. At the end of the war, the IMK joined the secular KRG, angering its more hardcore elements and leading to the creation of the country’s first Salafi-jihadist groups. Although intermittent fighting broke out between secular Kurds and the IMK, the KDP and PUK were soon distracted by their own civil war, which took almost all of their attention between 19. The Islamists in the IMK were only too happy to oblige, organizing a number of attacks in the region against both PUK and KDP targets. There is no holy grail, and one should be wary of those who promise it. The stories of Kurdistan’s ISIS members should serve as a reminder of the complexities of the region’s problems. The Iranians were joined by Syrian Baathists in their efforts to destabilize both Saddam’s dictatorship and the Kurdish region’s newly elected secular nationalist government, which was run by the two giants of Iraqi Kurdish politics and society, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Throughout the early 1990s, the IMK continued to receive training and financial and logistical assistance from Saddam’s enemies. Unsurprisingly, the bombing had a significant radicalizing effect on the population, which the IMK exploited by declaring jihad on the Iraqi government in response. The Halabja province is best known as the site of Saddam’s 1988 chemical weapons strike, an atrocity that took the lives of around 5,000 Kurds. This location also ensured that the group was in close proximity to its patrons in the Iranian regime, which at the time was engaged in its eight-year war with Iraq. ![]() The IMK and other Kurdish Islamists traditionally sought refuge in the east of what would become Iraqi Kurdistan and had a strong base in Halabja, a more religiously conservative province there. It is also a domestic problem, and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) internal security services have been hard at work preventing ISIS attacks within its territory, arresting Kurdish and Arab members (and even Western foreign fighters, we were told) and dismantling the group’s remarkable recruitment and logistics network. ISIS, however, is not just a terrorist insurgency threatening the borders of Iraqi Kurdistan. ![]() Despite the concern it caused, this attack was more a demonstration of the group’s increasing desperation than anything else. A week prior to our visit, Taza was the site of one such attack, which led to hundreds of casualties. “All we see now are a few mortar shells,” he said, “just to remind us that they are there.” In some cases, ISIS has resorted to using shells laden with chlorine and mustard gas. The head of the base there told us that, since the start of the U.S.-led air campaign in 2014, ISIS has been unable to mount any serious assaults in the area. We learned more about the conditions that take someone away from his or her home, family, and friends to the so-called caliphate.ĭuring a peshmerga-guided trip to Taza, a settlement just outside Kirkuk that represents one of the front lines against ISIS in Iraq, Kurdish commanders appeared genuinely relaxed. Our research involved interviewing Kurdish security officials, peshmerga commanders, intelligence officers, and Kurdish prisoners who had joined ISIS. We spent two weeks in Iraqi Kurdistan in order to gain a better understanding of ISIS and the war against it. The Kurds are particularly self-assured when it comes to the threat that the Islamic State poses to the borders of Iraqi Kurdistan, which the group menaced before the Kurdish peshmerga forces (and Western airpower) began beating it back in August 2014. “Jihadism has existed here for decades, and ISIS will be defeated just like the rest of them,” a confident senior Kurdish intelligence official told us.
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