Recent Developments in the Kurdish Independence Movement in Iraq

Nearly 20% of Iraq’s population is Kurdish. The Kurds, whose total population of nearly 40 million stretches across Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and the former Soviet Caucasus, have long lived in the north of modern Iraq, but have sought to form their own nation-state. Their quest for independence has resulted in a number of civil wars between various Kurdish groups and Iraqi governments. From 1986-1989, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime committed the genocidal Anfal campaign in which government forces murdered roughly 100,000 Kurds as a way to pacify the Kurdish independence movement. Since the end of al-Anfal, and the United Nation’s Operation Provide Comfort from 1991-1996, fighting between the Kurds and Iraqi government has dissipated. However, intra-Kurdish fighting in the mid-1990s saw Saddam’s forces militarily back Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) against rival forces from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).