Historical Background of ISIS

As a result of a coincidence of political, cultural, and historical circumstances, ISIS surprised the world by quickly conquering territory the size of Great Britain in the heart of Iraq and Syria,Footnote ¹ taking advantage of state failures in both countries. Within its borders, it enjoyed a fairly self-sufficient economy and control of vast reserves of oil. In Iraq in particular, ISIS exploited the resentment of the country's Sunni minority toward the Shiʿi-dominated central government. In the Muslim world outside of Iraq, other Islamic movements pledged allegiance to the group, and ISIS acquired a stream of global funding in addition wide-ranging combat and terrorism experience. The group's existence is inconceivable without the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The following military occupation of Iraq marked a turning point in the history of jihadist movements, as it acted like a magnet to bring different jihadist groups together into one country, whereas they had previously been more isolated and scattered across various theaters of war in Chechnya, Algeria, and Afghanistan.Footnote ²

At its maximum extent, ISIS dominion stretched from the border with Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan in the north, to Jordan and Saudi Arabia in the south, to the suburbs of Baghdad in the east, and to Damascus in the west.Footnote ³ Acting as a state while rejecting the validity of existing international borders, the Islamic State wanted to annex more territories and expand its area, aspiring ultimately to control of the entire Muslim world. Branches were formed in almost every region of the Islamic world. ISIS proudly presented a brutal self-image to the world. It sought to acquire chemical weapons, as well as the technical knowledge to manufacture them, and thus recruited dozens of Iraqis, Syrian, and Lebanese chemical experts.Footnote ⁴ ISIS introduced its own map of the areas it sought to control in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and some parts of Europe, labelling them with names used in previous Islamic empires.

Figure 1. ISIS planned map of territorial control, named after previous Islamic empires.

ISIS, which began calling itself the Islamic State in order to better represent the global scope of its ambitions, deliberately engaged in excessive violence as a form of psychological warfare. Some analysts believe that ISIS had adopted Abu Bakr Naji's strategic theory “Management of Savagery” as a framework for its complex and sophisticated practice of psychological warfare.Footnote ⁵ On the ground, ISIS fought on all fronts: against the Kurds in the north, Iraqi armed forces in the east, and Syrian government forces and opposition factions in the west. Russia eventually entered the fray as well, using air raids to bombard ISIS positions in Syria [Figure 2].

Figure 2. The actual frontiers of ISIS against the Kurds, Iraqi armed forces, and the Syrian regime.

Ideological Aspect

The ideological roots of ISIS can be traced back to the ideas of certain religious intellectuals, who considered the revival of Islam as the only solution for rescuing Muslim communities from a condition of chronic societal weakness. Specifically, they called for the revival of an Islamic Caliphate in accordance with what they perceived to be the political, social, and ethical standards established in the seventh century.Footnote ⁶

The ISIS ideology also carries an undercurrent of fascism. In the course of Islamic history, there have been similar ideological irruptions under different names, outbursts of fervor that recognize neither temporal or physical limits nor the concept of holiness. Characteristically, such movements revolve solely around their leader (caliph) and his ideas and decisions. ISIS claims to embody the purest level of Islam, enacting a solution heralded by several Islamic parties and intellectuals as a panacea for the problems of the Muslim world. However, in actuality, they wage brutal wars, destroy mosques and the shrines of prophets, and rape and murder innocent people – a fatal strategy for the long term, even if it yields some brilliant tactical successes in the short term. Their slogan of “No God but Allah” demonstrates a core belief that they act as personal representatives of God, allowing them to assume a juridical power higher than that of any human authority. Consequently, atrocities, mass destruction, genocide, and extremism are natural consequences of their way of thinking.Footnote ⁷

Further, the ideology of ISIS is directly linked to an offshoot of the Wahhabist understanding of Islam. Salafism, in the form put forward by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab in Najd during the eighteenth century in present-day Saudi Arabia, was an extreme interpretation of Islam that covered all aspects of the religion, from creed to worship. They innovated a radical new theory of Islamic creed by attacking contemporary Muslim communities as dens of disbelievers or apostates and then by seeking to enforce the judgment of apostasy, by which the apostates must be killed. The group would later be called the Wahhabis, after its founder Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab. A sect called the Kharijtes (“seceders”) were the first to carry out the radical ideology promoted by Wahhabism.Footnote ⁸ Their first conflict was with the fourth Islamic Caliph ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. According to Mansi, Sulaimn, the brother of Muhammad ibn al-Wahhab, accused his brother of being a practicer of the thought of Kharijites.Footnote ⁹

Though Wahhabism was alien to the majority of the Muslim community, by the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it had become a dominant Islamic trend. From their beginnings, the Wahhabis took their way of life with deadly seriousness and placed the utmost worth on practicing Islam; this led to their marginalization throughout Muslim societies, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabism is the official version of Islam supported by the government.Footnote ¹⁰ Nevertheless, the nature of the non-Saudi societies made them reluctant to accept such an extreme and uncompromising ideology in the name of Islam. Therefore, Wahhabism suffered from isolation within those Muslim societies, and the more liberal the society, the more it was isolated.

Wahhabi thought can quickly lead to violence. A group subscribing to Wahhabism can use that ideology to accuse a given community of being non-Muslim, and then use their ideology to justify the use of violence against them. Al Mansi wrote, “the Wahabism thought is the origin source of the modern Takfiris,” which is the practice of calling other Muslims non-believers or apostates. “Muhammad Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab himself practiced this ideology, that which is now adopted by terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, sometimes distributing his books among their followers.”Footnote ¹¹

Following the discovery of vast oil reserves under the sands of Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism began to spread globally, financed by the revenues flowing from sales of oil. Toward the end of the century, with the help of ‘Usama bin Laden, Wahhabism entered a more violent phase in Afghanistan, leading to Salafi Jihadism and eventually to Al-Qaeda. Attwan highlights “The development of bin Laden's and al Qaeda's ideology – perhaps best described as Salafi-jihadi.”Footnote ¹² Currently, the Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman's agenda as embodied in the government's 2030 Vision plan for future development is working toward liberalizing the Kingdom and diminishing the traditional role of Wahhabism. Yet, beyond Al-Qaeda, Wahhabism is the main doctrine behind radicalization in Islam, and most, if not all jihadists, including ISIS, share ties to it.Footnote ¹³

Why Does ISIS Hate the Kurds?

Unfortunately, for non-Arab Muslims and non-Muslims alike, Islamic literature is rife with examples of hatred toward them. This is because Islamic history, prophetic tradition, and even Qurʾanic interpretations have been written after the dawn of Islam and long after the death of the prophet. Obviously, during those eras, many non-Arab ethnic groups had embraced Islam as a religion, while a pro-Arab ethnocentric sentiment grew among Muslim rulers, especially during the ‘Umayyad and the ‘Abbasid dynasties.

Though the growth of such ethno-nationalist sentiment was not in line with the religious precepts of Islam, and much historical evidence from the early Islamic period refutes such sentiment, it was nevertheless a political imperative at the time to promote Arab interests at the expense of non-Arab Muslims and/or non-Muslims. Consequently, this kind of racialism led to many catastrophes wrought by extreme Arab Muslims toward non-Arab Muslims and other non-Muslim communities in various historical contexts from the late antique to the modern and intensified under the reign of Saddam Hussein and his chauvinistic brand of Arab nationalism.

Though Muslim scholars agree on the humane principles of Islam, they seldom tolerate criticism of how the history of the Muslim community is documented by Muslim historians. Therefore, few Muslim intellectuals have the courage to speak out in criticism of the official historiography. Abdulrahman Sideeq, a Kurd, is one of the few who do. Sideeq, in a television program, remarked on this fact and refuted the official historical account that the Muslim community committed atrocities against the Jewish population of Medina.Footnote ¹⁴ He argues such narratives were fabricated, influenced by the Arab sentiment of later historians who wanted to recast the Muslim reaction to any kind of opposition by non-Arabs as being more forceful and violent than it really was, in order to legitimize genocidal campaigns, such as those committed by Saddam Hussein's regime and ISIS against the Kurds. To Sideeq, this will continue as long as such false historical narratives are not adequately refuted and disproven.Footnote ¹⁵

The kind of narrative treatment of Islamic history that Sideeq attacks has nothing to do with Islam; rather, it has been exploited by extremist religious groups such as ISIS, as well as secular nationalists such as the Baʿth Party, to drive a wedge against non-Arab Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Sideeq states that the reason for this is that the historical record has been composed by Arab historians with a pro-Arab bias.Footnote ¹⁶ Sideeq further argues that such historians never recorded that Muslim troops had enslaved the non-Muslim Arab women of Mecca after defeating them in the battles of Badr, Uhud and Khandaq (or the battle of the “ditch”).Footnote ¹⁷ Consequently, when the Muslims defeated the unbelievers and conquered Mecca, they pardoned all those non-Muslim Arab enemies. However, according to Sideeq, this was not the case with the Jews!Footnote ¹⁸

These interpretations of history have led to the misuse of Islamic history for contemporary political ends. For instance, Saddam Hussein attempted to inject historical poignancy into his war against Iran by calling it “Qadisiyyah,” in reference to the historical battle of Qadisiyyah in 636 CE between the Muslim army and the Sassanian Empire, implying that he was representing the glory of Islamic history against the non-Muslim Persians. This historical framing further freed him to unleash all kinds of barbaric tactics against the Iranians. Similarly, when Hussein committed genocide against the Kurds, he named the military operations after a chapter of the Qurʾan called “Anfal,” implying that the Kurds were not Muslims. Consequently, in addition to killing 182,000 Kurds in the Anfal operations,Footnote ¹⁹ his regime enslaved their women too.Footnote ²⁰ Acts like this have the potential to continue repeating, whether those subjected to the hostility of extreme Arabism are Muslims like the Kurds, or non-Muslims such as the Yazidis.

Apostasy

A shared characteristic of Islamic extremists, from the non-violent Wahhabis to ISIS, is that they often try to find a way to attack the authenticity or legitimacy of other Muslims’ faith in order to show that they, the extremists, are the one true followers of the path of Islam.Footnote ²¹ For example, when ISIS was ruling in Mosul, they changed the school curriculum. In our research for this study, we were able to obtain a PDF copy of an ISIS-provided textbook,Footnote ²² which is a credo written for year-one students for their first term. The book mainly relies on the Wahhabi doctrine and cites Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahab, the founder, in espousing crucial non-negotiable ideological points of view. The book states that “Shaikh al-Islam Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab said that there are a lot of tyrants, and their main categories are five.”Footnote ²³ The classification starts with the devil and ends with “those rulers who rule by secular Laws,” whom are further subdivided into four categories: tribal chieftains who rule by customs and traditions; members of the infidel Parliaments;Footnote ²⁴ members of legislative councils; and judges of the secular courts.Footnote ²⁵

During the reign of the fourth caliph, ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Kharijites introduced the practice of denying someone else's Islamic faith as being false and untrue. Later on, Muslim rulers encouraged scholars to generate a consensus on the concept of apostasy, which they deployed against anyone opposing their rule. Alalwani explains:

All that any ruler or extremist contender to political power had to do in order to delegitimize their opponents, was to label them as apostates. According to ISIS, all modern political systems, such as democracy, socialism, and nationalism, are for infidels too.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, to ISIS, any Muslim who is involved in any kind of modern politics, including any Islamic political parties participating in any of those political systems, is an apostate.Footnote ²⁸

In the view of ISIS, apostates, whether Sunni Muslim, Yazidi, nationalist, or Islamist, all equally deserve the same fate of beheading. However, the vicious enmity of ISIS toward the Kurds derives from many reasons beyond just radical Islamic doctrines. The next section explores how the composition of the personnel of ISIS itself combined with extreme Islamic ideology and extreme Arab nationalism to produce its signal anti-Kurdish sentiment. In particular, three factors played a major role in shaping ISIS ideology vis-à-vis Kurds: the prominence of former high-ranking Baʿth Party officials within ISIS, the influence of fundamentalist Islamic ideology, and the concept of global jihadism.

1. Baʿth Party Influence on ISIS

The Baʿthist Ideology formed a cornerstone of ISIS ideology, which exaggerated pro-Arab sentiment at the expense of other ethnic groups. When the Americans dismantled the Iraqi army shortly after the U.S. invasion in 2003, thousands of former army officers and soldiers were suddenly rendered unemployed and vulnerable to recruitment by terrorist groups, including the forerunners of ISIS. Thompson states: “Instead of giving Iraq a fresh start with a new army, it helped create a vacuum that ISIS has filled.”Footnote ²⁹ Hence, many former senior Iraqi officers numbered among the leading members of ISIS. In his investigation of ISIS leadership, al-Shumarry identified ex-army colonel Haji Bakr as that the righthand man of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of ISIS. Bakr was also appointed head of the three-person ISIS military council and in 2012 he was promoted to minister of military industry; he also worked on plans for developing and manufacturing chemical weapons.Footnote ³⁰ Abu Aiman Al-Iraqi, a lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein, likewise became the senior-most ISIS official in Syria. He also served as one of the three members of the ISIS military council headed by his former Baʿth Party comrade Haji Bakr.Footnote ³¹ These ex-military officers of course came out of a military institution that engaged in war crimes against the Kurds of Iraq, including the chemical bombardment of Halabja in 1988 that resulted in more than 5,000 deaths and the “Anfal campaigns” that led to the deaths of 182,000 Kurds.

Saddam Hussein's “faith campaigns” further linked the pro-Arab Baʿath ideology to the intellectual framework of ISIS. From the 1990s until 2003, Saddam Hussein endeavored to revive Islam as a political force in Iraq, allowing Baʿathists to establish connections with religious extremists, including Al-Qaeda. In the wake of 2003, this made it easier for a Baʿathist to find himself ideologically aligned to a terrorist group such as Al-Qaeda or ISIS, especially when they shared a common enemy in the occupying force of U.S. troops and the new political actors dominating Iraq's political scene following the 2003 invasion, including the Kurds. Thus, one of ISIS's ideological roots is Baʿathism, and in particular the belief in Arab superiority.

2. Fundamentalist Ideological Influence

The second ideological pillar of ISIS is its fundamentalist ideology. ISIS attempted to establish a political system based strictly on its particular understanding of Islam, symbolized by the establishment of an Islamic caliphate through what it called jihad. This basic principle animated its concepts and procedures, and in particular its vision of establishing an Islamic state in Iraq and the Levant that would govern all Muslim communities. ISIS adopted terrorizing and violent tactics to impose their understanding of Islam on society. They also regarded their methods as the favored way to approach God. Their embrace of savagery is closely associated with the jihad that al-Zarqawi refers to, when acts of slaughter were committed under the guidance of two main antagonists, Abu ‘Abdulla Muhajir (also known as Abdul Rahman Ali) and Abu Bakr Naji.

Al-Zarqawi was deeply influenced by Muhajir and studied his book on blood, in which he states that anyone who surrenders to God's will shall never be like a dead person.Footnote ³² Muhajir decrees that a country governed by secular law belongs to infidels and should be abandoned. He also suggests that infidels should be murdered if they do not provide a religious safe haven: supporting infidels and following their rule is a great blasphemy. Under Muhajir's interpretation, Islam does not differentiate between civilians and non-civilians. Both deserve to be beheaded, which is an act condoned by God and his messenger. Al-Zarqawi's other intellectual influence, Abu Bakr Naji, promoted a belief in jihad as the best way of guiding the Muslim community and saw terrorizing, expelling, and mutilating Christians and their atheist associates as a divine duty, similar to the mutilation and maiming of Banu Qurayzah during the early days of Islamic history. Some might think that ISIS is no more than a product of faith and religion, or merely the result of decades of dictatorial rule, thought, and behavior in various Islamic and Middle Eastern Arab countries.Footnote ³³ Thus, under the radical, arguably un-Islamic ideology followed by ISIS, the Kurds deserve the same fate of extermination as any other infidel would. As a consequence, ISIS had no ethical qualms about publicly beheading Peshmerga prisoners of war.

3. Global Jihadism

The third ideological underpinning of ISIS is the legacy of global jihadism. When Bin Laden and Al-Dhawahiri articulated their vision of global jihadism, they called for “the enemies of Islam” to be attacked by any likeminded jihadist whenever the opportunity arose. In a similar statement, in an undated YouTube video clip, jihadist preacher Mullah Krekar statedFootnote ³⁴:

This violent mentality of global jihadism can motivate non-ISIS members to conduct terror attacks as well – such as with the October 29, 2020, knife attack at a church in Nice, France – but it was especially effective when ISIS was controlling a large territory and claiming to have erected a caliphate.

ISIS installed its political system based on special Wahhabi “Najdi” fatwas,Footnote ³⁶ particularly those related to law. Saudi Arabian mufti Mohammed ibn Ibrahim Aali al-Shaykh (d. 1969) labelled everyone who enacts or enforces secular law as non-believers. Many researchers believe that the state's intellectual reference is based on the doctrine of “Salafi jihad” inherited from Al-Qaeda, which is an attempt to reconcile the Salafi, the Hanbali, and Sayyid Qutb's thought along with Sirury. It produced a sum – Salafi jihad – that was distinct from its constituent parts. It was first put into practice during the period of the Afghan jihad. More generally, the fatwa of insurgents relies heavily on intellectual figures in the Islamic State and other Salafi-jihadist factions, and deploy jurisprudential texts such as Ibn Taymiyya's fatwa, called the Tatras fatwa, which legalizes fighting against Muslim rulers.

The concept of Tatras (literally, “human shield”) holds that any Muslim who is used as a shield by infidels must be killed. This became a basis for justifying military operations against innocent Muslims.Footnote ³⁷ According to this doctrine, fighting non-Muslims is an absolute necessity.Footnote ³⁸ Al-Qaeda has relied on Salafi-jihadism as a basis for fighting against non-Muslims and launching military invasions. The doctrine of Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani, the founder of the Tahrir (Liberation) Party, interprets the Prophet Muhammad's words and actions as concrete proof of the holiness of jihad against infidels and propagating Islam at all costs. Consequently, ISIS ideology was the outcome of a group of converging orientations, from which several influential political and social forces evolved.Footnote ³⁹

The Ideological Approach of ISIS Toward the Kurds

According to a controversial prophetic saying, differently interpreted by Islamic scholars, there would be a great and decisive battle between Muslims and an alliance of infidels near Aleppo, the second-largest city in Syria. Some experts believe the spot is situated somewhere between Rabia, on the Iraqi border with Syria, and the Aleppo region. The saying constitutes the essence of ISIS ideology. Abu Hurayra recorded that the Prophet Mohammed had said the Romans would arrive in Amaq or DabiqFootnote ⁴⁰ before doomsday and an army of the best people in the world from Medina would confront them. The Romans would attempt to fight against those Romans who converted to Islam and are called brethren by Muslims. A war would break out between the two armies and one-third of the Muslims would be martyred and another one-third would conquer Constantinople (Istanbul).Footnote ⁴¹

The prediction forms the basic rudiments of ISIS ideology, and it impels them to make whatever military preparations they can. ISIS used the saying to draw a stark division: ISIS fighters and their enemy. According to ISIS military strategy, women of the enemy group are to be abducted and raped, to provoke the enemy into attacking ISIS in an attempt to free their women. The Muslims would then gather to defend the Muslim invaders, i.e., ISIS, and band together to defeat their enemy and conquer Constantinople. The battlefield would be Kurdistan, and, since many of the raped women were Yazidi Kurds, the war would take on an ideological aspect against the Kurds, turning it into a holy war that religiously necessitates their elimination.

As mentioned above, Saddam Hussein inflicted a similar genocide against the Kurds during the Anfal campaigns. The Baʿthist regime was not purely Islamic, and the Kurds were not apostates or non-believers in Islam. However, a justification for committing genocide against Kurds can always be found, whether the victims are Sunni Muslims or Yazidis. All too often, the global Muslim community, and particularly in the Arab world, meets ongoing violations of the human rights of Kurds with silence. Two major factors worked in favor of the Baʿthists in their genocidal policy toward the Kurds. First, many Sunnis saw the Baʿthist regime as a buffer against any expansionist aims of the Shiʿi government of Iran. Second, chauvinistic sentiment among Arabs fortified their silence. Even now, when the tension between Islamism and Kuridsh nationalism surfaces in the Arab world, the vast majority of Arabs keep silent. The muted reaction to recent offenses by ISIS against the Kurds in Iraq and Syria bears evidence of this view, as not one Arab state has condemned the Islamic State's actions against the Kurds.

Furthermore, ISIS believed the Kurds would sympathize with its own renegade state-building project, while considering the Kurds’ efforts in this regard as a threat to their nascent Islamic State – a competing nationalist aspiration likewise considered unacceptable by Arab nationalists such as the Baʿthists.

Even with all their ideological differences, ISIS has opposed the Kurdish nationalist movement in much the same way as the Baʿthists did, committing similar crimes of murder, intimidation, and displacement as Saddam Hussein's regime during its rule over Kurdistan. This is despite the Kurdish movement's initiatives after 2003 to rebuild Iraq based on principles of democracy, federalism, human rights, and power-sharing. Beyond the Baʿthists and ISIS, other groups within Iraq look at the Kurds through the same lens of hostility.

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq has played a leading role in reconciling the Kurdish political parties in Syria, which are either allied with or opposed to its central government. The Kurdistan Region has repeatedly persuaded the Kurds in Syria to remain impartial and stay away from the bitter sectarian conflicts in the Middle East. It has experienced political development in the past few years and the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) role in bringing the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to a peace agreement reinforced its own internal development process. The KRG was a party to the agreement, based on which PKK guerrillas agreed to leave Turkey and seek shelter in Iraqi Kurdistan. By attacking Kobani, a Kurdish majority city in northern Syria, ISIS collaterally targeted the peace process in Turkey. Abdulhakim Khasraw argues that a secure and stabilized Kurdistan would guarantee Kurdish impartiality in conflicts in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, and any threat to the KRG would jeopardize stability in the region. Consequently, Western military aid to the Kurds is entirely justifiable to avoid undermining security in the region.Footnote ⁴²

The Political Aspect of ISIS Against the Kurds

The foregoing discussion shows that ISIS can be accurately characterized as a radical ethnonationalist movement with a genocidal orientation toward Kurds. It has declared outright hostility toward Kurdish movements seeking national liberation and considers all Kurdish lands as part of its supposed caliphate. Toward that end, it has established several special units for fighting against Kurdish forces, hoping to subjugate them and occupy their lands. Thus, ISIS seeks to eliminate the Kurds, who they see as a threat to its existence. In particular, its threat assessment regarding Kurds revolves around four factors: the efficacy of the Peshmerga as a military opponent; the willingness of Kurds to work with U.S.-led coalitions; popular support for the Peshmerga; and the unwillingness of Kurdish Islamists to support or cooperate with ISIS.

International Coalition

The Kurds’ resistance to ISIS and their willingness to fight alongside the U.S.-led international coalition have served as a direct provocation to ISIS, eliciting even further animosity. Furthermore, the Kurds have received assistance in weaponry and financial and logistical aid from countries including the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Italy, and Russia. Even Turkey has had no objection to the provision of such assistance to the Peshmerga. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told CNN that Ankara supported the idea of arming Kurdish Peshmerga in the Kurdistan Region,Footnote ⁴⁴ and Turkey also agreed to let the Peshmerga cross its borders to fight ISIS in Kobani [Figure 3].

Figure 3. Volunteer Peshmerga.

Being a Peshmerga is considered the greatest honor among Kurds. Former president of Iraqi Kurdistan Masʿud Barzani has often announced with pride that he is a Peshmerga, conveying the sense that it is at least as important and dignified as his office as president. For that reason, throughout various Kurdish uprisings and revolutions, civilian Kurds have supported the Peshmerga by quartering them in their houses and by joining the fight when called upon.Footnote ⁴⁵ Many non-Kurdish volunteers, as well as other Kurds from the region and the Kurdish diaspora, have traveled to Iraq or Syria to join the fight as well. An unpublished TV program by a freelance Kurdish journalist in Britain entitled “Peshmergas from Britain” explores the situation of two British-Kurdish volunteers in the battle for Jalawla.

International support for the Peshmerga's fight against ISIS is strong in Europe and particularly in the United Kingdom, where, for instance, apart from logistical and military support, there is a bipartisan parliamentary groupFootnote ⁴⁶ on Kurdistan, which closely monitors the situation and reports back to parliament. In 2016, a cross-party team of British members of parliament met with Peshmerga forces near Mosul [Figure 4].Footnote ⁴⁷

Figure 4. Boris Johnson on the frontline against ISIS alongside Peshmegra.

The Kurdish Islamists

Thirdly, to the great disappointment of ISIS, Islamists in the Kurdistan Region have aligned themselves with the KRG and supported the Peshmerga in its fight against IS. It was a crucial moment when the Islamists denounced ISIS and questioned its religious claims in the name of Islam. This of course further fed ISIS's resentment against Kurds.

The Islamic Movement in Iraqi Kurdistan (IMIK) is the most noteworthy Islamist political organization in the region. It began during Saddam Hussein's reign as dictator of Iraq. As Hussein's belligerence toward the Kurds intensified, the result was described by Leezenberg as:

Thus, from the beginning, Kurdish Islamists’ political participation was on the side of their fellow Kurdish nationalists in opposing the Iraqi regime. Their defiance in standing up against the Iraqi regime was as necessary then as it is now with respect to ISIS and other permutations of violent Arab nationalism. Sami Shourush cited the third edition (1989) of the official publication of IMIK, al-Nafeer newspaper, in quoting the group as having stated the following:

In the same document, IMIK declared its political objective was to rid Iraq and Kurdistan of Saddam Hussein's regime. Hence, the Kurds’ motive to form a political organization came as a reaction to a serious episode of ethnic cleansing by the Iraqi government against the Kurds. Also, the objective remained political – to overthrow an oppressive regime. Meanwhile, this political struggle was somewhat coordinated with other Kurdish nationalist organizations, such as the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).Footnote ⁵⁰

IMIK was led by a group of mainstream Shafiʿi clerics, who collaborated with the Kurdish liberation movement. However, a small group of Afghan jihadists, who followed a doctrine of combative Salafism, including Mullah Krekar, returned to Kurdistan and also joined IMIK. This led to the formation of a group of extremists within IMIK, with ideological and political aims beyond the Kurdish liberation movement. They triggered ideological differences with other non-Islamist Kurdish organizations, namely the PUK, and many bloody battles broke out between them. Eventually, the radicals split off from the IMIK and started their own terrorist organization.Footnote ⁵¹

The remaining terrorist groups among the Kurdish jihadists later joined ISIS. More recently, a new crop of jihadists has joined the terrorist group, among them a Salafi shaykh known as Mula Shwan, who has been labelled in Kurdish media as a notorious exponent of Kurdish terrorism. According to Rudaw, there are an estimated 500 Kurds terrorists within ISIS ranks.Footnote ⁵² Despite the proximity between ISIS-controlled territories and the Kurdistan Region, 500 is a relatively small figure compared to ISIS recruits from elsewhere. According to Altagreer, 3200 Tunisians have joined ISIS, 3000 Saudis, 1500 Moroccans, and 700 French nationals.

The relatively low number of Kurdish recruits to ISIS can be explained by a number of factors, according to (Mustafa: 2020). First, the nature of the Kurdish political context, which emphasizes the struggle for national rights and self-determination based on ethnos. Second, the Kurdistan Islamic Union's (KIU)Footnote ⁵³ pioneering work as a non-violent civilian actor has served as a role model for young Kurdish Islamists, particularly the Islamic Group and IMIK.Footnote ⁵⁴ In fact, the three Islamic political parties in Kurdistan Region participate in the struggle for political autonomy of Kurdistan, with the KIU and Islamic Group drawing the support of around 330,000 voters.Footnote ⁵⁵ Furthermore, ISIS may have an interest in exaggerating the number of Kurds within its ranks for the sake of undermining international support for the KRG.

Thus, it is unlikely that the ideology of ISIS will grow among the Kurds. Instead, the Peshmerga has been held out as the legitimate defender of the Kurds, as well as other minority groups who find a safe haven in the Kurdistan Region from the terror of ISIS. As for the Kurds’ attitude toward terrorists, whoever is linked to ISIS terrorists is strongly denounced by all.

ISIS regards the Kurdish movements as followers of the Western powers in terms of their ideology and organization. This perhaps represents an extension of the Baʿthists’ view of the Kurdish liberation movements as being puppets of Israel and Western colonial powers. Indeed, ISIS claims it is trying to abolish the borders drawn under the Sykes-Picot agreement on the grounds of advancing the interests of Sunni Arabs, and thus it considers any attempt to foil its plans as a plot supported by Western colonialism. ISIS has made similar accusations of collaborationism with imperialist powers against the Shiʿi, Christians, Yazidis, and other groups, who had themselves already been victims of the Sykes-Picot agreement. As a defender of specifically Sunni Arab interests, ISIS believes it necessary to exterminate a Kurdish presence in those territories carved by the Sykes-Picot agreement. However, the reality is that they have been responsible for harming Sunni Arabs in that area more than any other group, and when Sunni Arabs have had a chance to escape from ISIS control, they have sought refuge in the Kurdistan Region.

Compared to the regular Iraqi forces, ISIS has faced especially strong resistance from the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, first from those defending Iraqi Kurdistan and second by the Kurds who participated in the liberation of Iraqi Sunni areas from ISIS control. Arguably, Kurdish forces have been the terrorist group's biggest threat, forcing ISIS to open up continuous fronts and to assume a defensive posture. Kurdish resistance has further provoked the militant group to launch myriad attacks on Kurdish defense lines and use its media propaganda arms to inflame sentiment against Kurds. ISIS did briefly penetrate KRG borders, which challenged the Kurds to protect a 1,000-kilometer-long frontier. While the Peshmerga were trying to stop the advancement of ISIS on the ground, the United States announced its assistance to the Kurds in their fight against ISIS. Together, they succeeded in stopping ISIS from consolidating a regional entity from which they could build an empire. Even when ISIS announced the end of its holy war against the Kurds, it continued its attacks on the outskirts of Kirkuk, the Mosul Dam, and Sinjar. However, the overall question of future relations between Kurds and Sunni Arabs in Iraq remains unsettled, especially since the advent of ISIS has greatly complicated regional trends and strategies. It should be noted that the process of dismantling the organization of the Islamic State will not be easy and forms a crucial part of the complex Middle East geopolitical equation.

ISIS's Narrative of the Kurds

In addition to calling Kurds apostates and Western collaborators,Footnote ⁵⁶ ISIS also exploited the existence of small factions of leftists among the Kurds to label the group as a whole as Marxists.Footnote ⁵⁷ Obviously, this would justify ISIS in treating the Kurds as they would any other non-Muslim group. Hence, according to ISIS, the Kurds must either accept its version of Islam or die, and the Islamic State did not hesitate in waging war against them.

ISIS's publications, in particular Dabiq, clearly evince its views on the Kurds in Syria and Iraq. For instance, ISIS states that after being informed of their status as apostates, a Kurdish group so accused would have a few days to repent. Repentance to ISIS means the acceptance of its interpretation and version of Islam. Otherwise, they would be executed. The group's use of the phrase “Kurdish communists” reveals the logic by which the Kurds’ claim to Islamic faith is negated, rendering them as infidels who deserve to be murdered.Footnote ⁵⁸ The statement below, published in Dabiq, claimed the following:

The Yazidi Kurds, who are not Muslims, feel disrespected and even dehumanized when they hear that they are called devil-worshippers. Labelling them as such makes them an easy target for mass killings. To ISIS, the Yazidis who gave up their kufr (literally, “blasphemy”) were forgiven and those who did not, “fled with Peshmerga apostates.” Subsequently, the Yazidis who remained insistent on their faith faced the brutality of ISIS: the males were killed and female Yazidis were raped and sold as sex slaves.Footnote ⁶¹

Another ISIS narrative is that the Kurds are purely secular and consider Israel as well as the “crusaders” to be an ally of any future Kurdish state.Footnote ⁶² This reflects an attempt to mobilize Muslim public opinion against the Kurds and their political parties, in particular the PKK. Furthermore, it depicts the Kurdish political parties as friends of Israel and the Western world. ISIS literature is chock full of such rhetoric. For instance, in issue 10 of Dabiq, ISIS states, “the bulk of the Kurdish political and military factions today are secularist or Marxist. The most prominent of these rival factions are the PKK, the KDP and the PUK.” Again, expressing hope for discord between the main Kurdish political parties, another Dabiq article stated, “May Allah increase the animosity and violence between the apostates of the KDP, PUK, PKK, and Gorran”Footnote ⁶³

Calling the Kurdish political parties secularist, Marxist, or apostate targets them for murder by extremist groups, including others than ISIS. Gunter summarized the following reasons why ISIS attacks the Kurds: