The latest rocket attack against the U.S. troop base in Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital Erbil was another worrying sign that the security and stability that its residents have touted over the years is under constant threat. However, history indicates that the city will likely endure and pull through despite the odds.
On February 15, rockets descended on Erbil International Airport, which hosts U.S. troops in Iraq that form the main component of the multinational anti-Islamic State (IS) coalition. The rockets killed a non-American contractor and injured about a dozen people. This wasn’t the first such rocket attack in Erbil; on September 30, 2020, a previous attack targeted the same site but failed to kill or injure anyone. However, this attack was the first time such rockets also landed in residential areas and injured civilians there. It, therefore, seemed to have at least two warnings. The first being another warning to U.S. troops that they aren’t safe anywhere in Iraq, including the autonomous Kurdistan Region. And the second a warning to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) that these militias are capable of undermining Erbil’s security through such attacks.
Despite the unprecedented nature of the attack, Erbil residents didn’t seem all that panicked and were certainly far from shaken, never mind terrorized. There is a good reason for this. Erbil has long been a peaceful and stable city in a region often rife with conflicts and instability. It’s also long been quite conservative while the eastern Kurdish city of Sulaimani had a much different reputation as the stronghold of Kurdish nationalism and activism as well as being substantially more liberal.
It’s for this reason that the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, as I learned from Ofra Bengio’s extensive 2012 history of the Iraqi Kurds, chose the “more docile and amenable Erbil” as the capital of the Kurdish north and even relocated Sulaimani University, a hotbed of Kurdish activism at the time, there, where it was sure it could exercise much tighter control over it.
Iraqi Kurdistan gained de-facto autonomy in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. That autonomy was later made official and recognized under the Iraqi Constitution after 2005. Erbil is, to this day, home to Iraqi Kurdistan’s parliament and all of the KRG’s institutions and ministries.
In 1992, Kurds in Erbil, protected by their lightly armed Peshmerga and the U.S.-led no-fly zone against Saddam Hussein’s tanks and helicopter gunships that had sent them fleeing en masse from the region the years before, voted in their first democratic elections. However, the region, and the city, soon became engulfed by a highly counterproductive civil war between Iraqi Kurdistan’s two most powerful political factions, Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The region’s war was so baffling to outsiders that journalists sometimes even confused Barzani and Talabani. When one Australian television reporter called Barzani Talabani during a press conference with the KDP leader, he simply reacted by saying: “I don’t blame you. Australia is very far away.”
Control over Erbil was important for the two rivals in that war. In the mid-1990s, Talabani’s PUK controlled the city. The PUK leader’s taunting of Barzani, in which he jeered that the only way the KDP leader could ever see Erbil again was “through binoculars” from his palatial hilltop headquarters over the city, ultimately resulted in the KDP’s brief and infamous ad-hoc collusion with Saddam Hussein in late August 1996. In a devastating surprise assault, Iraqi military forces enabled the KDP to decisively rout the PUK from Erbil and go on the offensive, briefly even occupying Sulaimani, the PUK’s main stronghold in the east, and almost pushing Talabani and his fighters over the border and into Iran.
The civil war ultimately left about 6,000 dead and ended in a ceasefire. To this day, the KDP remains the dominant party in Erbil while the PUK retains control over Sulaimani.
After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 deposed Hussein, Iraq descended into sectarian violence that threatened to rip the country apart. Aside from a deadly suicide bombing on Erbil in February 2004 that killed over 100 (including senior KDP politician Sami Abdulrahman, in whose memory the largest park in the city is named), Iraqi Kurdistan stood in stark contrast for its stability and economic prosperity throughout the bloody years of the Iraq War. The Kurds capitalized on this stark distinction by advertising their region to foreigners and potential investors as “the other Iraq.”
“Glossy, overpriced shopping malls overflowed with spoiled teenagers, many of whom resided in the luxury skyscrapers which rose where bullet-riddled cinderblock huts once stood,” wrote journalist Amberin Zaman of this period. “This ‘other Iraq’ that beckoned investors, and even tourists, stood in stark contrast to the rest of the country that was wracked by sectarian bloodletting. Indeed, during the boom years, it was hard to feel much sympathy for the Iraqi Kurds, let alone grasp their persistent drive for a country of their own.”
Many Kurds also bragged that Erbil, which they claimed had more hotels than Paris, would become the next Dubai. However, these ambitious and grandiose dreams were cruelly shattered by a dire economic crisis and the onset of the IS war in 2014. Infamous groups swiftly overran Iraq’s second city Mosul with little resistance in June 2014. Then, in August 2014, it began subjecting the Yazidi minority of the Sinjar region to a grotesque genocide and advanced toward Erbil.
The militants bragged that they would fly their black flag of jihad over the city’s iconic citadel once they had conquered and annexed it into their self-styled “caliphate”. As IS approached the city limits and appeared poised to capture or at least attack it, many residents prepared to flee, crowding the airport seeking any available flights.
At the last minute, as IS set up artillery within range of the city, the United States intervened with airstrikes and launched its military campaign against the marauding group.
The Peshmerga was able to rebound and established defensive positions over a frontline approximately 800 miles long. Except for some small terrorist attacks early in that conflict, Erbil was spared the fighting and widespread destruction caused by that brutal war thanks to the Peshmerga’s sacrifices, approximately 1,700 of whom died combating the terror group, U.S. air support and ever vigilant internal Kurdish security services who foiled numerous attempted terrorist plots in Kurdistan’s cities.
Throughout the IS war, it almost became a cliché for Western journalists reporting from the Kurdish capital to highlight its close proximity, a mere 50 miles, to IS-occupied Mosul, where public beheadings were not uncommon, in order to demonstrate some of night and day contrasts between the two, invariably emphasizing Erbil’s stability and the hospitality Kurds show to foreigners.
By July 2017, IS was routed from Mosul and the Iraqi part of its territorial “caliphate” was largely destroyed. The following September, the Kurds overwhelmingly voted ‘yes’ in an independence referendum. Iraq promptly closed its airspace over Kurdistan to all civil flights, effectively blockaded the autonomous region and demanded that the KRG surrender their control over the region’s airports and international border crossings to Baghdad.
The following month, the Iraqi military and Iran-backed Shiite militias seized the disputed regions of Kirkuk and Sinjar from the Peshmerga. And they didn’t stop there. The triumphant militias then advanced to the borders of the autonomous region. The militias’ aim appeared to be seizing border crossings between Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey by force and possibly advancing on Erbil to capture the airport in a similar fashion.
While more heavily armed than the Peshmerga, their goals, whatever they ultimately would have been if they had prevailed, were thwarted after two weeks of skirmishes with the Kurdish forces along the border. In the most famous clash, the Peshmerga destroyed an American-built Iraqi Army M1 Abrams main battle tank operated by the militias with an anti-tank missile. Fighting was brought to a halt by a ceasefire and the city of Erbil was once again spared the horrific effects of war.
Beginning in October 2019, Iraqi activists began peacefully demonstrating against the rampant corruption and the immense power these Iran-backed militias wield over their country. Many of them were killed or otherwise had their lives threatened by these militias as a result. Others, fearing for their safety and lives, sought sanctuary in Erbil, where it is much harder for the militias to threaten them given the region’s effective security services.
Around this time, these militias began a campaign of targeting U.S. troops in various bases across Iraq to pressure Washington to withdraw. After one of these attacks in Kirkuk killed a U.S. civilian contractor, the U.S. bombed militia positions and then assassinated the powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and senior Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in a drone strike outside Baghdad International Airport on January 2020. Iran retaliated a few days later by firing ballistic missiles at an airbase hosting Americans in Iraq’s Anbar province and the U.S. troop base in Erbil’s airport.
The missile targeting the Erbil base failed to explode and did not cause casualties.
That strike was the first time Iran or its militias targeted the city and began this worrying trend. February 15 was the third and deadliest such attack. And, sadly, it undoubtedly won’t be the last for the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, given all these precedents, Erbil has a history of repeatedly surviving and overcoming some overwhelming odds that have allowed it to retain its status as a stable city, free from the depravities and horrors that invariably come with war in that troubled region. If this history is any indicator, it will likely endure this latest round of threats too.
Image credit: Kushared (Mohammed Sardar)
