The occupation of Sinjar by ISIS in 2014 brought external actors, such as the PMF and the PKK, to liberate the district and fundamentally shifted the nature of the conflict from
a national to a transnational dispute.
Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the 2005 Iraq constitution, Sinjar became part of the country’s ‘disputed territories’ – a stretch of land that extends across the north of Iraq from Diyala governorate at the border with Iran to Sinjar at the border with Syria. In addition, the disputed territories also include part of Salah al-Din governorate, Kirkuk governorate and the Nineveh Plains region of Nineveh governorate. Successive Iraqi governments since 2006 have failed to resolve these issues due to their refusal to collaborate with the KRG in implementing Article 140 of the 2005 constitution. As a result, Sinjar became an arena in which the Baghdad government and the KRG competed for authority. Like the other disputed territories, Sinjar’s population is diverse, including Yezidis, Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shia Arabs. The KRG considers Yezidis to be Kurds (a view many Yezidis reject) and has thus sought to annex Sinjar to the territories under its control. In the aftermath of the US-led invasion in 2003, the KRG moved into Sinjar and took control of administrative authorities in the district. The government of Iraq rejected the KRG’s claim on Sinjar and unsuccessfully attempted to assert federal authority over the district.
At this time, the KRG strived to take advantage of the Iraqi government’s weakness. The remote Sinjar district held a special geostrategic and political significance for the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the dominant political party within the KRG. Sinjar is located near Iraqi Kurdistan’s Duhok governorate, which is a KDP stronghold and a critical hub for trade with Türkiye. Notably, Sinjar’s population constitutes a substantial voting block that is key to securing parliamentary seats at the national level, and thus greater political power. The KDP therefore endeavoured to enhance its security presence and political base in Sinjar by maintaining its Peshmerga forces in the area, and by co-opting many leaders and members of the Yezidi community through patronage – such as by offering jobs and other economic benefits.
The rise of ISIS, and its takeover of Sinjar, changed the nature of the dispute. In the face of ISIS’s August 2014 offensive on Sinjar, the Iraqi security forces stationed there quickly collapsed. For its part, the KDP-aligned Peshmerga withdrew without any prior warning to Sinjar’s population. The Iraqi military collapse and the hasty KDP withdrawal paved the way for ISIS to occupy the district and conduct a genocide of Yezidis. Both the government of Iraq and the KRG proved incapable, unable and unwilling to protect the Yezidis against ISIS. Their inaction, in the eyes of many Yezidis, still greatly undermines the credibility and legitimacy of both governments.
The ISIS occupation of Sinjar generated responses from international actors, like the US, as well as armed actors, such as the PKK and the PMF, both of which travelled to Sinjar to fight ISIS. Backed by US air power, the KDP returned to northern Sinjar a year after its withdrawal and helped regain control of the district in November 2015. But the KDP was not the only actor involved in the operation to defeat ISIS. In 2016, while the central government concentrated its main forces on liberating the city of Mosul, also in Nineveh governorate, it deployed the PMF to fight and remove ISIS from southern Sinjar.
The PMF was formed in 2014 from several existing Shia paramilitary groups in response to the rise of ISIS. These groups, individually and collectively, were and are transnational in their own right. Several of them have strong relations with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). After the collapse of national and KDP forces in 2014, the PMF was the first security actor on the frontline to defend Iraq against ISIS as the latter approached the outskirts of the capital city of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, the PKK, whose forces arrived in Sinjar from northern Syria and from the group’s bases in the mountainous regions of Iraqi Kurdistan, also played a role in the fight against ISIS. The removal of ISIS was followed by the emergence of a fragmented security terrain with armed forces aligned with the KDP, the PMF and the PKK taking positions in different areas of Sinjar.
The withdrawal of the KDP from the district in the aftermath of the KRG’s 2017 independence referendum paved the way for the PKK and the PMF to become the most powerful players in Sinjar.
The defeat of ISIS ushered in a new era of multifaceted competition for control over Sinjar between various actors including the KDP, PKK, PMF and the central Iraqi government. Within this context, the KDP, which sought to regain its pre-ISIS dominant position in Sinjar, faced strong challenges from the PMF and the PKK. While central authorities still lacked a meaningful presence in Sinjar after the defeat of ISIS, the Iraqi government (the National Security Council) agreed to pay the salaries of the PKK local allies to counter KDP ambitions in the district. The withdrawal of the KDP from the district in the aftermath of the KRG’s 2017 independence referendum paved the way for the PKK and the PMF to become the most powerful players in Sinjar.
This new reality meant that the Sinjar question became more than a dispute over territory between a regional government and a federal government. Subsequently, the number of actors party to the conflict increased, and the geographies with influence over the outcome expanded. The parties and areas involved in the conflict today are not just local and national, but also external, revealing the ‘outside in’ nature of the transnational conflict.
Beyond assisting the Baghdad government when their objectives align, the PMF and the PKK have their own reasons for maintaining a presence in Sinjar. The district sits at a strategic crossroad between Iraq, Syria and Türkiye. It borders Syria (only 50 kilometres away from the Syrian border in the west) and is close to the southern borders of Türkiye (only 70 kilometres away from the Turkish borders in the north). Sinjar’s location provides the PKK and the PMF with a strategic advantage. For the PKK, which fights the Turkish military in southern Türkiye, Sinjar allows the group to connect its areas of operation in Syria’s Rojava area and in Iraqi Kurdistan near Türkiye’s southern borders. Sinjar’s mountainous terrain also provides PKK members with a sanctuary from Turkish air attacks. For the Iranian-allied PMF groups, Sinjar provides an alternative route to Syria and Lebanon where they can support the Syrian regime and Hezbollah in Lebanon. These groups have even claimed that Sinjar can be used to launch missiles at Israel, in defense of the Palestinian cause, and have escalated their conflict with the US after the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza.
These events and developments have collectively helped to give the conflict in Sinjar transnational characteristics. The below timeline, in Figure 2, marks important events that have shaped Sinjar’s recent history.
