In terms of the
terror that Isis inspires through
the savagery of its actions, it does
indeed have much in common with the
Mongolian horsemen who destroyed
Baghdad and slaughtered its
inhabitants in 1258. Isis similarly
cultivates an atmosphere of fear
among its enemies, so that the Iraqi
army disintegrated when Isis forces
stormed Mosul last June and much the
same thing happened when they
attacked the supposedly more
resolute Iraqi Peshmerga in Sinjar
and Nineveh Plain a few months
later.The
swift victories of Isis at that time
gave the impression of a demonic and
unstoppable force. In the eyes of
Isis leaders, military successes far
beyond what they had expected simply
affirmed that they were carrying out
God’s work and had divine support.
Less attention was given to the
weaknesses of the states and armies
which Isis had so easily defeated.
But it is on their ability to learn
from past failings that the outcome
of the war now being fought in Iraq
and Syria will be determined.
Criticism of
Isis’s opponents and their dismal
performance on the battlefield has
mainly focussed on the Baghdad
government. There is no doubt that
its corruption and sectarianism
played into the hands of Isis. Less
attention is given as to why the
military forces of the Kurdistan
Regional Government (KRG),
supposedly far tougher and better
commanded, fled from the Isis attack
in August even faster than the Iraqi
army in June. Yazidi villagers from
Sinjar and Christians from the
Nineveh Plain complain bitterly that
they were abandoned by Peshmerga
units whom only hours earlier had
sworn to defend them to the last
drop of their blood. It was one of
the most shameful defeats in
history.
The KRG has always
got a better press than the Baghdad
government, particularly since its
oil boom got under way in the past
five or six years. It presented
itself as “the other Iraq”, which
functioned properly, and Kurdish
leaders invariably disparaged the
central government in Baghdad as
crooked and dysfunctional. They
pointed to new five-star hotels,
shopping malls, roads, bridges and
apartment buildings sprouting on
every street in Irbil, the Kurdish
capital. There was a boom town
atmosphere, and there were very few
places on earth of which this could
be said in the wake of the financial
crash of 2008. Delegations of
foreign businessmen, many of whom
could not have found Iraqi Kurdistan
on the map a couple of years
earlier, poured into Irbil. Local
managers complained that they could
not find rooms for them despite all
the new hotels. It seemed to go to
the heads of Kurdish leaders who
spoke of KRG becoming like an oil
state in the Gulf, a landlocked
version of Dubai.
Visiting KRG a
couple of years ago, I felt that it
was alarmingly similar in mood to
Ireland pre-2008 at the height of
the Celtic Tiger boom. The Kurds and
the Irish are both small nations who
feel they have been hard done-by
throughout their history. Now they
had thrown off foreign oppression
and were getting rich like their
neighbours. In Irbil as in Dublin it
was a feeling conducive to delusion
and a belief that “the Kurdish
tiger” would bound forward for ever.
What those
plane-loads of over-optimistic
foreign government ministers and
businessmen never understood was how
fragile all this was. There was more
in common between the ways in which
the KRG and the rest of Iraq were
ruled than they imagined. The Kurds
depended on their 17 per cent share
of Iraq’s oil revenues to pay the
one in three of the labour force
that worked for the government.
Corruption was rife. A friend told
me that he lived in part of Irbil
surrounded by director generals
working for the government: “I have
a higher salary than any of them,
but they have houses three times
bigger than mine.” One Kurdish woman
told me: “I call it ‘Corruptistan’.”
For all the new five-star hotels, it
was difficult to find a good school
or hospital.
KRG was always
flattered by any comparison with
Baghdad. “Ease of doing business in
Irbil compared to Baghdad is very
good,” a businessman told me in
early 2013. “Compared to the rest of
the world it is rubbish.”
What really made
Iraqi Kurdistan different from the
rest of Iraq was that security was
good, and it felt safe. Kurds and
foreigners alike never seemed to
look at a map and notice that they
lived an hour’s drive from some of
the most violent places on the
planet. Mosul is only 50 miles from
Irbil and has never been other than
an extraordinarily dangerous city
since 2003.
The belief that
Iraqi Kurdistan is the safe part of
Iraq was punctured when Isis
captured Mosul last June. Even then,
the Kurdish leadership deluded
itself that what had happened was a
Sunni-Shia battle in which they
could stay on the sidelines and even
benefit by opportunistically taking
over Arab-Kurdish disputed areas. In
August, they discovered they had
made a calamitous error when Isis
launched an ambitious offensive that
came close to capturing Irbil. The
United States and Iran rushed to
help, while the KRG’s new ally,
Turkey, found itself unable to.
Irbil today looks
like Pompeii or Herculaneum in which
a sudden disaster – in the Kurds’
case military rather than volcanic –
has frozen all activity. The city is
full of half-completed hotels,
shopping malls and apartment
buildings. Some of these are crammed
full of refugees living in huts
provided by the UN High Commission
for Refugees. These are the people
who are paying the price for the
Kurdish leadership’s delusions of
grandeur and security. Overall,
there are 1.2 million extra
internally displaced people and
Kurdish refugees from Syria in KRG
since last June. Kurdish leaders
claim credit for giving them refuge,
but many of those who have lost
their homes blame those same leaders
for underestimating the Isis threat
when it was containable.
The Peshmerga have
made successful counter-attacks,
taking back much of Sinjar, but
Mosul and its surroundings remain
firmly under Isis rule and, so long
as this continues, the KRG will
remain fundamentally insecure.
Crucial to the Peshmerga advances
have been US air strikes, and it is
noticeable in visits to the
frontline how dependent the
Peshmerga is on US air power.
This staves off
the prospect of total defeat, but
the future of the Iraqi Kurds still
looks grim even if it is not as bad
as it looked last August when many
in Irbil started to flee the city
just as they had done in 1991 during
Saddam Hussein’s counter-offensive.
Whatever happens, as in Ireland
after 2008, the days of the “Kurdish
tiger” are truly over.