On the evening of August 8th, Najat Ali Saleh, a former commander of the Kurdish army, was summoned to a meeting with Masoud Barzani, the President of the semiautonomous Kurdish region that occupies the northern part of Iraq. Barzani, a longtime guerrilla fighter, was alarmed. Twenty-four hours before, fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) had made a huge incursion into the Kurds’ territory. They had overrun Kurdish forces in the western Iraqi towns of Sinjar and Makhmour, and had surged as far as Gwer, fifteen miles from the capital city of Erbil. At the Mosul Dam, on the Tigris River, they had seized the controls, giving them the ability to inundate Baghdad with fifteen feet of water. The Kurdish army is known throughout the region for its ferocity—its fighters are called peshmerga, or “those who face death”—and the defeat had been a humiliation. “We were totally unprepared for what happened,” Saleh told me. Kurdish leaders were so incensed that they relieved five commanders of their posts and detained them for interrogation. “It would have been better for them if they had fought to the death,” he said.

Saleh, a veteran of the Kurds’ wars against Saddam Hussein, was being called back into service. His orders were to retake Makhmour and keep going, pushing back ISIS fighters wherever he found them. Working quickly, he gathered several thousand soldiers, surrounded the city, and went in. By the next day, Makhmour was in Kurdish hands; in the following weeks, the Kurds forced ISIS fighters out of twenty surrounding villages. When I saw Saleh, on a recent visit, his men had just recaptured a village called Baqert. With mortars still thudding nearby, he exuded a heavy calm, cut by anger. I asked him if he’d taken any prisoners. “Only dead,” he said.

The fighting between ISIS and the Kurds stretches along a six-hundred-and-fifty-mile front in northeastern Iraq—a jagged line that roughly traces one border of Iraqi Kurdistan, the territory that the Kurds have been fighting for decades to establish as an independent state. With as many as thirty million people spread across the Middle East, the Kurds claim to be the world’s largest ethnic group without a country. Iraqi Kurdistan, which contains about a quarter of that population, is a landlocked region surrounded almost entirely by neighbors—Turkey, Iran, and the government in Baghdad—that oppose its bid for statehood.

The incursion of ISIS presents the Kurds with both opportunity and risk. In June, the ISIS army swept out of the Syrian desert and into Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. As the Islamist forces took control, Iraqi Army soldiers fled, setting off a military collapse through the region. The Kurds, taking advantage of the chaos, seized huge tracts of territory that had been claimed by both Kurdistan and the government in Baghdad. With the newly acquired land, the political climate for independence seemed promising. The region was also finding new economic strength; vast reserves of oil have been discovered there in the past decade. In July, President Barzani asked the Kurdish parliament to begin preparations for a vote on self-rule. “The time has come to decide our fate, and we should not wait for other people to decide it for us,” Barzani said.

Since 2003, when the U.S. destroyed the Iraqi state and began spending billions of dollars trying to build a new one, the Kurds have been their most steadfast ally. When American forces departed, in 2011, not a single U.S. soldier had lost his life in Kurdish territory. As the rest of Iraq imploded, only the Kurdish region realized the dream that President George W. Bush had set forth when he ordered the attack: it is pro-Western, largely democratic, largely secular, and economically prosperous. President Obama recently told the Times that the Kurdish government is “functional the way we would like to see.”

Still, the Administration, bound to a policy it calls One Iraq, is quietly working to thwart the Kurds’ aspirations. American officials are warning companies that buying Kurdish oil may have dire legal consequences, and the warnings have been effective: the Kurdish regional government is nearly bankrupt. And yet, as the peshmerga work to force ISIS out of Kurdish territory, they have been supported by American jets and drones, and by American Special Forces on the ground. In August, President Obama ordered covert shipments of arms to the Kurds. By the end of the month, Kurdish forces had taken back much of the territory that they had lost to ISIS, and were preparing operations to reclaim the rest.

Obama has spoken carefully in public, but it is plain that the Administration wants the Kurds to do two potentially incompatible things. The first is to serve as a crucial ally in the campaign to destroy ISIS, with all the military funding and equipment that such a role entails. The second is to resist seceding from the Iraqi state. Around Washington, the understanding is clear: if the long-sought country of Kurdistan becomes real, America’s twelve-year project of nation building in Iraq will be sundered. Kurdish leaders acknowledge that the emergence of ISIS and the implosion of Syria are changing the region in unpredictable ways. But the Kurds’ history with the state of Iraq is one of persistent enmity and bloodshed, and they see little benefit in joining up with their old antagonists. “Iraq exists only in the minds of people in the White House,” Masrour Barzani, the Kurdish intelligence chief and Masoud’s son, told me. “We need our own laws, our own rules, our own country, and we are going to get them.”





1 / 12 Chevron Chevron PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOISES SAMAN / MAGNUM Peshmerga forces near the city of Kirkuk, on the front between Kurdish and ISIS fighters. July 13, 2014.

On March 16, 1988, Nosreen Abdul Qadeer, a sixteen-year-old newlywed in the Kurdish town of Halabja, was helping her mother prepare lunch for guests when she heard a series of explosions. This was unremarkable: the government of Saddam Hussein, then at war with Iran, had lumped the Kurds in with its foreign enemies. But the planes that day were flying unusually low, barely above the treetops. “I could see the pilots inside, taking photos of the city,” she said. The family rushed to the basement to wait out the bombardment.

A few minutes later, Qadeer noticed that her family members’ eyes were turning red. Then an eerie smell seeped under the doorway and down the stairs. One moment it reminded Qadeer of apples, the next of rotten eggs. When the shelling stopped, she and her family went outside. “Children were vomiting in the streets,” Qadeer said. “People’s noses were running with blood. Goats and chickens were on the ground choking to death.” [cartoon id="a18507"]

As people around her collapsed, Qadeer began to run, and found herself with a group of people she didn’t know. As they hustled toward the edge of town, they turned into the wind, discovering that it was easier to breathe that way. Qadeer urged strangers to keep moving, even as they passed the dead. She found many of the stragglers laughing deliriously as they expired. One was a boy, seated on the ground, who refused to budge. “Let me do my homework!” he said. “Let me do my homework!” That night, as the group prepared to sleep in an abandoned building, Qadeer began to lose her eyesight, and her memory started to fade. Her husband, Baktiar, found her, and placed tea leaves over her eyes to ease the burning. The next day, the group, with nearly everyone blind, began to move again, roping themselves together so that no one would be lost. A few days later, Qadeer awoke in an Iranian hospital, lashed to a bed. She was blind, burned, and bleeding from her vagina. But, she said, “I was not dead after all.” Twenty days later, her vision began to return. It was only then that she and the others realized that they had been attacked with chemical weapons.