Ongoing conflict in Iraq’s Sinjar district poses a threat to national, regional and international stability, and has prevented thousands of internally displaced persons from returning to their homes.
The tiny district of Sinjar in northwestern Iraq’s Nineveh governorate is far from the centres of power, and may seem too remote to have much impact on the geopolitics of conflict across the Middle East. However, its recent transformation from a nationally disputed territory to a transnational conflict hub has put the district at the centre of the current escalation of armed violence across the region.
Despite its liberation from Islamic State (ISIS) in 2015, the district has remained engulfed in violence. Most of Sinjar’s people are unable to return to their homes and are still displaced in temporary camps located in the neighbouring Kurdistan Region of Iraq. This includes over 280,000 Yezidis from Sinjar who still live at camps in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Duhok governorate.
Powerful external armed groups now compete, often violently, for authority in Sinjar, which they then use to gain influence and to support allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Türkiye. One such armed group is the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militant political group fighting for the rights of Kurds in Türkiye and across the region. Türkiye has been engaged in a decades-long battle with the PKK, and has designated the PKK as a terrorist organization. The PKK’s status in Sinjar led Türkiye to carry out air attacks targeting PKK positions in the district. Since 2020, Türkiye has significantly increased its bombing of the area. The district has also witnessed violent clashes between local militia groups aligned with the PKK and the Iraqi federal forces (both in 2019 and 2022). The May 2022 clashes resulted in the re-displacement of thousands of Sinjar’s citizens who had only just returned.
The district has also become attractive to Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella group of paramilitary organizations that came together to fight ISIS. The PMF and its Iranian allies view Sinjar as a key transit hub that enables them to connect to other regional allies, including the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Some PMF groups, such as Kataib Hezbollah, operate across Sinjar and Iraq’s borders with Syria as part of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which violently challenges US influence in the region. On 29 January 2024, Islamic Resistance in Iraq launched a drone attack that killed three US soldiers along the Jordan–Syria border. The US has frequently targeted these PMF groups with military force at their primary transnational hub: al-Qaem, an Iraqi town on the border with Syria. In response, PMF groups increasingly prefer the mountainous topography and seclusion of Sinjar as a base from which they can pursue authority in the region.
Consequently, the district has become one of the most volatile and securitized areas in the region, connecting conflicts in and across four countries: Iraq, Syria, Türkiye and Iran. Armed clashes have the potential to spill over and extend beyond these countries and deeper into the Levant, with Iran-allied armed groups – opposed to Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories – threatening to target Israel with rockets fired from Sinjar’s mountains.
Sinjar’s troubled post-ISIS transition has attracted considerable national and international funding and attention. At the local level, programmes with international support have focused on facilitating reconciliation between the district’s diverse population, which is made up of Yezidis (a Kurdish-speaking religious minority that is the district’s largest community), Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shia Arabs.
In 2020, the Baghdad government and the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq (KRG) in Erbil signed the Sinjar Agreement. The agreement called for a new administration and security structure to stabilize Sinjar and allow its displaced residents to return home. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) pushed for this deal. However, the agreement was never implemented.
Why has this agreement not been implemented? What explains the policy community’s struggle to address the ongoing conflict in Sinjar and its regional implications? One reason for this is that local and national policy and programmatic approaches often miss a key structural condition of the instability in Sinjar today: transnational conflict. This paper argues that Sinjar has become an arena of competing actors and geographies that transcends the bounded terrain of nation states. This dynamic has significant consequences not only for those inside Sinjar but also for those far away but connected to the conflict that spills over. These impacts and relationships can be described as reflecting both ‘outside in’ and ‘inside out’ mechanisms, as illustrated in Figure 1. From the ‘outside in’, external actors, such as the PKK and the PMF, compete for military, economic, political and ideological authority in Sinjar. And from the ‘inside out’, this competition and violence spills over across countries in the region.
