The flag of Kurdistan, the national flag of the Kurdish people. Jens Kalaene/DPA. All rights reserved.In early December 2016, the burning of a Kurdish flag in the northern Syrian town of Amuda revealed the fault-lines of intra-Kurdish power relations. The flag was allegedly burned by supporters of the ruling Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), whose armed wing is the People’s Protection Units (YPG), in Syria’s Rojava region. The YPG is an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a left-wing Kurdish group fighting for autonomy in Turkey. Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq strongly condemned the incident. Moreover, the Barzani administration has been very uneasy about the PKK’s armed presence in the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq, which the group has yet to abandon after battling the Islamic State there in the summer of 2014.
While Turkey pressures the United States and the Barzani administration to prevent Sinjar becoming the PKK’s new headquarters, the United States diplomatically seeks to prevent any intra-Kurdish clashes in the middle of anti-ISIS coalition efforts. In late December 2016, Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister of the KRG, urged the use of force in order to push the PKK out of Sinjar. Amidst this increasing political tension between the two major Kurdish groups in the region, the first armed clash between the PKK-affiliated Yazidi group called Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS) and a group called Rojava Peshmarga, close to Masoud Barzani, led to casualties in early March, near the town of Khanesor in Sinjar, northern Iraq.
For many Kurds, this intra-Kurdish hostility has led to fears of another “Birakuji” (Kurdish Civil War) that devastated the region during the violence of the 1990s among competing Kurdish factions. For Middle East experts, this intra-Kurdish tension has once again raised the question of whether Kurds across the borders are more likely to unite or clash with each other in the era of the Islamic State challenge.
