Op-Ed: Iran Overestimated Role in IS Fight

The dust from the Islamic State’s attack on the Kurdistan Region has finally begun to settle, giving us a clearer picture of what occurred.

What we now know is that Iran was the first country to send weapons and artillery to stop the extremists’ advance into Makhmur.

But why Iran? And why weren’t Iranian Kurds allowed initially to join the fight against the Islamist militants? Why is the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) — which was hiding in the mountains until it joined the fight against the extremists —roaming freely around Iraqi Kurdistan now?

From the start of the Islamic State’s (IS/formerly ISIS) attack on Mosul in June, Iran put Kurdish parties under pressure to fight the Islamist radicals. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) was happy to join the fight, but the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) was reluctant.

The message President Massoud Barzani gave the Iranian envoys to Erbil was: “This isn’t our war and we don’t want to get involved in it.”

But it was a war, and the Kurds’ involvement was inevitable.

At the outset, Shiite leaders talked big by calling up militias and making speeches declaring an imminent victory. The Americans and top Shiite clerics warned of a Shiite-Sunni war that could destroy the Middle East.

Iran, meanwhile, removed outgoing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki from office and didn’t let the war disintegrate into a Shiite-Sunni fight.

Iran turned the war against IS into a broad-based battle. If the Kurds hadn’t joined the fight, it would have remained a religious war and not a war on terrorism as it is now.

Iran and the PKK pulled one over on the KDP and the Change Movement. It is believed that some in the KDP were in favor of appeasing Iran and joining the fight.

Yet Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani’s silence on this issue raises questions. More than anyone else, the prime minister and the Minister of Peshmerga Affairs, Mustafa Sayid Qadir, have been quiet regarding this extraordinary situation.

It is true that America and Iran got the Kurds involved in this war, but each side made calculations of their own that didn’t necessarily work out as they had hoped.

Barzani can now say that he is fighting terrorism on behalf of the world and that he is receiving arms and support from the international community. Indeed, it was his dream to acquire weaponry.

It seems that Iran, however, didn’t take into count global support for the Kurds. Tehran must have assumed it would lead the war against the IS as a regional power, but it was wrong.

For their part, the PKK and PUK used the situation to flex their muscles against the KDP and claim that they saved Kurdistan from IS.

Iran did manage, once again, to give the Kurdistan Region’s politics a violent shake. Despite the initial push for independence after IS invaded Mosul, the Kurds now seem far less enthusiastic about creating a Kurdish state.

http://rudaw.net/english/opinion/26082014