A power struggle between Baghdad and Erbil is targeting the country’s most vulnerable.

By Winthrop Rodgers, a journalist and analyst based in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq.

Since it gained semi-autonomous status in 1992, Iraqi Kurdistan has largely charted its own course, separate from the federal government in Baghdad. But in recent months, increasingly organized federal authorities have attempted to impose greater control over the region. And ethnic and religious minorities are caught in the middle.

Since the start of the year, Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court has eliminated seats in the Kurdistan Parliament that had been reserved for Christians, Turkmens, and Armenians. The Ministry of Displacement and Migration also announced that remaining camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Kurdistan Region, which house tens of thousands of Yazidis and Sunni Arabs, must close by the end of July.

The Kurdistan Region’s image on the world stage has long been one of exception; Kurdish leaders have carefully cultivated a reputation that, “whereas in the rest of Iraq and the Middle East, minorities are prosecuted for being Yazidi or Christian … in the Kurdistan Region, they are protected, they are given a shelter,” said Shivan Fazil, a researcher at the Institute of Regional and International Studies, housed within the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani.

On Easter last year, the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) cited a “culture of coexistence and unity between the different communities.” The frequently invoked line is a central plank of the KRG’s pitch for political support and economic development aid to foreign partners and donors, including the United States.

The situation on the ground was never as rosy as Kurdish officials claimed, however. The KRG “might claim coexistence, brotherhood, and peaceful living together, but none of this is true,” said Toma Khoshaba, an official with the Assyrian political party Sons of Mesopotamia. “We still feel a lot of bias and prejudice.” Christian communities, for example, regularly complain that their land is taken without compensation. Last year, Yazidis were subjected to attacks and abuse online after baseless rumors circulated on social media that a mosque had been burned in Sinjar.

Now, Baghdad’s steps to dismantle vehicles for minority representation and protection could imperil the KRG’s global stature—and leave minorities in the Kurdistan Region even more vulnerable to discrimination. These communities are caught in the middle of a larger shift in Iraq’s federal system that empowers Baghdad at the expense of the KRG in Erbil.

WHEN THE KURDISTAN PARLIAMENT was set up in 1992, it included five seats specifically for Christians. In 2009, the body added five additional spots for Turkmens and one for Armenians. The 11 seats for minorities—out of 111 total in the last parliament—enabled the KRG to claim that its institutions reflected its diverse constituency.

In recent years, however, the reserved seats became more and more controversial. Critics alleged that the representatives acted as de facto representatives of the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which has been accused of being increasingly undemocratic. By subsuming state institutions under party authority, the KDP has co-opted some legislators within the minority communities and allegedly gamed the electoral system to ensure loyalists win the reserved seats. Minority communities also complained that open voting lists allowed KDP-affiliated security forces and KDP supporters to dilute authentic minority participation. Some activists, like Khoshaba, feel that voting on these lists should have been legally restricted to members of the minority communities rather than to all voters. Many felt that the MPs failed to stand up for the interests of their communities once elected.

The Kurdistan Region’s other parties argued that the system provided the KDP with an unfair advantage in parliament by giving the party an 11-seat head start. Seeking to capture some of those positions for itself, the KDP’s rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), in May 2023 filed a lawsuit in Baghdad challenging the Kurdistan Region’s electoral law.

This intra-Kurdish division gave the authorities in Baghdad an opening to exploit. In a bombshell Feb. 21 ruling that went beyond what the PUK sought, the Federal Supreme Court abolished the seats entirely. It did not outline a specific logic in its decision. While opponents of the KDP celebrated the decision, Christian and Turkmen parties felt as if they had lost, even if they harbored complicated views about how the reserved seats worked in practice.

“By eliminating the reserved seats, they are eliminating our ethnic rights and our votes,” Khoshaba told Foreign Policy. He had hoped the court would reform the system rather than scrap it.

The KDP reacted furiously to the court’s decision, writing on X that the verdict violated “the principles of federalism and the principle of separation of powers enshrined in the Iraqi constitution.” But many consider the KDP’s protests political because the party so clearly benefited from the minority representation system.

“We are not even able to select a cleaner to work in our schools because the KDP selects them. The Kurdish authorities must select them. We do not have the right to select a mukhtar for any of our villages or in any Assyrian area because they are always selected by the KDP and the Kurds,” Khoshaba said. “We want to have authority. We want to be in a real partnership and not just to live and be safe and practice out religion.”

The Kurdistan Parliament could still pass a new, better electoral law to ensure authentic minority representation in the future, Fazil told Foreign Policy. “If they genuinely care about representation of those minorities, they can still salvage something,” he said. Instead, the KDP chose to boycott new regional legislative elections slated for June 10 in reaction to the court’s decision.

Baghdad is playing a bigger game. The court’s ruling is consistent with a pattern of decisions by Iraq’s federal government that undermine the Kurdistan Region’s ability to manage its own political and economic affairs—and instead boost the fortunes of the country’s ruling Shiite Coordination Framework, which came to power in 2022 after the election of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani. It is made up of a range of Shiite parties, many with strong ties to Iran.

While the Coordination Framework includes many major parties, some important factions like the Sadrists are not present in the current cabinet. Both the KDP and PUK have ministerial posts, but their presence is the result of Iraq’s sectarian power-sharing system rather than a reflection of their ability to drive policy. Reducing Erbil’s ability to govern its own affairs is key to rebalancing federal power toward Baghdad and centralizing decision-making across all of Iraq.

Minority communities are also significantly affected by Sudani’s order to close the remaining IDP camps in the Kurdistan Region, most of which were established in the 2010s. In January, Iraq’s Ministry of Displacement and Migration set a deadline of July 30 for the facilities to cease operations. Baghdad is also providing monetary incentives to tempt displaced families to go back to their homes in federal-controlled territory.

Fazil said that the government’s campaign to close the camps is partially an effort to move past a period defined by the Islamic State, but there is a clear political dimension to the decision as well. IDPs are a rich source of votes at election time, with the next round of federal parliamentary polls expected in 2025. The closure policy will likely push many IDPs back into disputed territories where they can be integrated into political patronage networks. Most IDPs are vulnerable and can be threatened or incentivized into voting a certain way. When they are located in the Kurdistan Region, the KDP can exert greater influence over IDPs’ voting behavior than if they returned to the disputed areas.

ASAAD BARJAS WAS A TEENAGER when the Islamic State attacked his hometown in the Yazidi district of Sinjar in August 2014. He and his family escaped the militant group and have lived in the Kabarto IDP camp in the Kurdistan Region’s Duhok governorate for the last nine years. Life is hard in the camp and, like many others, Barjas hopes to return to Sinjar. But his village of Tel Azer lacks basic services, adequate housing, and jobs.

In January, there were an estimated 161,000 IDPs living in the 22 camps currently operating in areas controlled by the KRG, according to statistics published by the International Organization for Migration. It is not clear from publicly available data how many of those in the camps are members of minority groups, but it is likely to be a high proportion given the IDPs’ places of origin. Almost 90 percent of those living in the camps are originally from Nineveh governorate, which includes diverse areas like Sinjar, Mosul, and the Nineveh Plains. Shabaks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Yazidis, Kurds, Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Kaka’is, and Turkmens all call this area home.

“I think this is a political decision. If they really want people to return to their homes—it’s been 10 years—they could have done something about that earlier,” Barjas said. “This decision is not well-studied. It’s not right. It’s not the right time, and we don’t see it as something logical to do.”

International humanitarian actors and foreign governments are closely watching the camps’ impending closures. As part of a shift from emergency humanitarian assistance to development, they are also in the process of shifting programming for IDPs to the federal government and the KRG, who will be primarily responsible for providing services to this population once they leave the camps. Nevertheless, the question of what will happen to the IDPs and where they will go looms large.

The KRG’s Joint Crisis Coordination Centre, the local department in charge of the camps in the Kurdistan Region, did not return a request for comment.

Since November 2023, three camps have shut down in Sulaymaniyah governorate, which is run by the PUK. The most recent to close was the Tazade camp on March 19. But so far, no camps have ceased operations in areas where the KDP is in charge. Those facilities host 94 percent of the IDPs currently living in the Kurdistan Region’s camps. The Ministry of Displacement and Migration has filed a lawsuit to force the KRG to act.

“The federal government is pressuring the KRG, and the decision to push the IDPs to return is part of a broader campaign to reduce the KRG’s authority,” Fazil said.

But it is minority groups that will suffer amid this escalating conflict between Iraq’s federal government and the Kurdistan Region. “As long as this minority-majority mindset continues, we are going to be continuously persecuted,” Khoshaba said. “We will not have a bright future here and everyone will leave.”

Source: Foreign Policy