Mera Jasm Bakr

The forces and agencies of Kurdistan’s Ministry of Interior and the Kurdistan Region Security Council, collectively referred to the Kurdistan Region Interior Forces, are now the region’s main security actors, but their role as instruments of partisan rivalry and enforcers of public loyalty to the political bureaus threatens the Kurdistan Region’s stability. This report makes the case that coalition security sector reform efforts should be refocused on them. Although Peshmerga reform is necessary to improve the Kurdistan Region’s ability to combat external threats, it is equally, if not more important to start the same reform within these internal forces and agencies to achieve durable stability.

With the emergence of ISIS in 2014, Western governments quickly increased military aid to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s (KRI) Peshmerga forces to defeat the group. After ISIS’s territorial defeat in Iraq in 2017, support to Kurdish forces continued with a reform package designed to professionalize and unify the Peshmerga forces commanded by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). However, focusing only on the Peshmerga leaves out approximately half of the KRI armed forces. Formed to counter external threats such as ISIS, the Peshmerga is no longer the main security actor in the region. After the withdrawal of Kurdish forces from the disputed territories in October 2017, this role has been subsumed by the forces and agencies of the Ministry of Interior (MoI) and the Kurdistan Region Security Council (KRSC), collectively referred to the Kurdistan Region Interior Forces (KRIF) in this report. Formed for the purpose of preventing crime and protecting regional institutions from terrorism and sabotage, partisan divisions within these units now pose the greatest risk to stability in the KRI. The KDP and PUK mobilize the interior forces in furtherance of political feuds, leaving little room to meaningfully implement reform within the security sector as a whole. Thus, reform within the KRIF is urgently needed to stabilize the region, but also to promote the reunification of the Peshmerga....Continue read.