In an April 26th article for the popular Newsweek magazine, Michael Rubin asks “Why Have the Kurds Supplied ISIS with Weapons?” He writes that “In the weeks before ISIS seized Mosul, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) apparently supplied some weaponry, like Kornet anti-tank missiles, to ISIS in order to weaken the central government with whom [President of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region] Masoud Barzani was locked in a political dispute.”
Rubin then goes on to imply that the KRG intentionally let the Yezidis be overrun by ISIS (“Barzani refused repeated requests by the Yazidi community first to send peshmerga reinforcements to defend them and then to at least provide the Yazidis with weaponry to defend themselves. As ISIS advanced, the peshmerga fled, leaving the Yazidi communities unarmed and undefended.”). This is followed by the claim that KRG President Massoud Barzani is awash in weapons donated by the international community and stockpiling them in order to fight fellow Kurds rather than using them against ISIS. Rubin adds that “Kurdish forces have sold donated German weaponry for personal gain. While the KRG has said it has no money to pay salaries, senior leaders have found millions to buy mega-mansions.”
Finally, Rubin describes how the Kurds in Iraq may prefer to fight Iraqi Shiites rather than ISIS: “…a KRG official has said that it might not be a Kurdish interest to defeat ISIS. Hiwa Afandi, a managing director in the KRG Department of Information Technology, tweeted, ‘Strategically, it’s a huge mistake to eliminate ISIS before we are done with Hashd militiamen. They represent a much bigger danger to Iraqis.’” Rubin concludes by lamenting the financial aid package for the KRG that the United States government just announced, arguing that “Sometimes, throwing money at a problem doesn’t resolve the problem, especially when the Kurds seem more intent on collecting aid than fighting corruption, and when the goal of defeating ISIS remains secondary to playing intra-Iraqi political games.”
It is hard to understand such accusations or where they come from. The first explosive claim regarding the KRG’s supposed provision of Russian Kornet anti-tank missiles to ISIS seems to lack any corroboration whatsoever. Your humble columnist could find no serious sources other than Rubin making this claim. Rubin provides no sources for the accusation other than a claim on his blog that he spoke to “interested parties in Baghdad, Amman and Ankara.”
A good number of “interested parties” no doubt exist in these cities. Perhaps these were some of the very same people who keep telling your humble columnist, every time he visits the region, that “America and Israel created ISIS.” No, it seems much more likely that ISIS captured such missiles from Syrian army units it overran, given that the Kornets are Russian weaponry. This is in fact the best guess of military analysts and publications such as Jane’s Defence Weekly.
The claim that the KRG, and specifically the Kurdistan Democratic Party’s (KDP) forces, intentionally let the Yezidis fall into ISIS hands is heard more often (and not just from Rubin). The alternative explanation – that KRG leaders did not initially trust Yezidis enough to arm them, that they were busy reinforcing Kirkuk instead of Sinjar, that the ISIS attack caught them by surprise, that the new generation of their Peshmerga had spent too long manning checkpoints and not enough time training or fighting, and that the initial defense against ISIS was badly coordinated -- is not exactly something the KRG wants to repeat too often. It is nonetheless not the heartless, cruel or even evil stratagem that Rubin seems fixated upon spinning.
To accuse the KRG, whose forces have done much more against ISIS than Baghdad or any other actor in Iraq and which has seen thousands of Peshmerga killed and wounded in the process, of not viewing ISIS as a real enemy likewise seems wholly undeserved. Does the KRG at the same time worry about out-of-control Shiite militias or would-be authoritarians in Baghdad? Of course – what rational person in Kurdistan would not? To take some poorly worded statement of an IT computer director in the KRG and twist that into some Kurdish Janus-faced policy to “play” the West, however, requires a fair bit of spin and a less than generous imagination.
As for some individual Peshmerga selling their weapons into the black market (and hence to ISIS, given how black markets work) – the KRG has admitted that this happened on occasion. When soldiers have not been paid in months, this sort of thing occurs. They have families to feed and rent to pay, after all. To spin this into “Kurds have too many weapons, they clearly want to fight each other with them and they are so greedy they even sell donated weapons to ISIS” seems little more than malicious. Does KRG President Barzani keep the best donated weapons for his best, most loyal and most elite units? Probably, but who wouldn’t in this context? The problem nonetheless seems much more acute in Baghdad with its militias than in Kurdistan.
Rubin is not, at least, manufacturing stories about mansions that Kurdistan’s politicians have bought in the past, corruption problems and democracy shortcomings in the KRG (although whether or not he presents these issues in context or in proportion is another matter). In the pages of this very newspaper and on more than one occasion, your humble columnist has criticized the KRG on these topics. If Rubin’s criticisms were coming from someone who had at least a little time to write about Baghdad’s much worse record on all these very same issues, however, perhaps they would appear more sincere or in context. If Rubin did not maliciously spin or insinuate about things like the Kornet missiles, the “black market arms sales to ISIS,” the Yezidi “betrayal” and other elements of his endless barrage of accusations against the KRG the way he does, perhaps it would not look like a concerted effort to smear the Iraqi Kurdish leadership.
Your humble columnist has no idea why Rubin would want to do this, unfortunately. The Iraqi Kurdish political leaders are not perfect, but one could do a lot worse in this neighborhood. The Kurds have in fact proven to be a lot braver, more democratic, more liberal, more pro-Western and more dependable than others in the region that the United States has spent a lot more money and effort backing.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
