March 23, 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n About the authors<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr. Zmkan Saleem<\/strong> is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Sulaimani. He is also an associate fellow at Chatham House and a senior researcher at the Institute of Regional and International Studies (IRIS).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr Renad Mansour<\/strong> is a senior research fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, and the Chatham House principal investigator for the XCEPT research project. He is also a senior research fellow at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, and a research fellow at the Cambridge Security Initiative based at the University of Cambridge. He is the co-author of Once Upon a Time in Iraq, published by BBC Books\/Penguin (2020) to accompany the award-winning BBC series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instability in the tiny Iraqi district of Sinjar, on the border with Syria and T\u00fcrkiye, continues to exacerbate conflicts in the Middle East. The area\u2019s remote location and its mountainous topography has enabled external groups to gain authority and access secure transit routes that connect conflicts in Iraq, T\u00fcrkiye, Syria and Lebanon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sinjar district has witnessed extreme violence in recent years, culminating in the rule of Islamic State (ISIS), which resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians and forced many more to flee. As a result, 280,000 Yezidis are currently living as internally displaced persons in camps in a neighbouring governorate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Efforts to bring stability to the district have failed due to the exclusion of the two most powerful groups in Sinjar: the Kurdish Workers\u2019 Party (PKK) and the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). A more transnational approach to Sinjar, which includes the PKK and the PMF in future negotiations over the district, has the potential to make real progress in stabilizing the area so that Sinjar citizens and Yazidis can return home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Popular Mobilization Forces<\/strong> (PMF\/Ha\u015fdi \u015eabi <\/strong>is an Iraqi<\/a> state-sponsored umbrella organization composed of approximately 67 different armed factions, with around 230,000 fighters that are mostly Shia Muslim<\/a> groups, but also include Sunni Muslim<\/a>, Christian<\/a>, and Yazidi<\/a> groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 01 Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ongoing conflict in Iraq\u2019s Sinjar district poses a threat to national, regional and international stability, and has prevented thousands of internally displaced persons from returning to their homes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tiny district of Sinjar1<\/a> in northwestern Iraq\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite its liberation from Islamic State (ISIS) in 2015, the district has remained engulfed in violence. Most of Sinjar\u2019s 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\u2019s Duhok governorate.2<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 T\u00fcrkiye. One such armed group is the Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party (PKK), a militant political group fighting for the rights of Kurds in T\u00fcrkiye and across the region. T\u00fcrkiye has been engaged in a decades-long battle with the PKK, and has designated the PKK as a terrorist organization. The PKK\u2019s status in Sinjar led T\u00fcrkiye to carry out air attacks targeting PKK positions in the district.3<\/a> Since 2020, T\u00fcrkiye 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).4<\/a> The May 2022 clashes resulted in the re-displacement of thousands of Sinjar\u2019s citizens who had only just returned.5<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The district has also become attractive to Iraq\u2019s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella group of paramilitary organizations that came together to fight ISIS.6<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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\u2013Syria 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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, T\u00fcrkiye and Iran. Armed clashes have the potential to spill over and extend beyond these countries and deeper into the Levant region, with Iran-allied armed groups \u2013 opposed to Israel\u2019s military occupation of Palestinian territories \u2013 threatening to target Israel with rockets fired from Sinjar\u2019s mountains.7<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sinjar\u2019s 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\u2019s diverse population,8<\/a> which is made up of Yezidis (a Kurdish-speaking religious minority that is the district\u2019s largest community), Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shia Arabs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sinjar Agreement<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.9<\/a> The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) pushed for this deal. However, the agreement was never implemented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why has this agreement not been implemented? What explains the policy community\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2018outside in\u2019 and \u2018inside out\u2019 mechanisms, as illustrated in Figure 1. From the \u2018outside in\u2019, external actors, such as the PKK and the PMF, compete for military, economic, political and ideological authority in Sinjar. And from the \u2018inside out\u2019, this competition and violence spills over across countries in the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n National borders tend to dictate how policymakers respond to conflict, even if that conflict is known to be transnational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For instance, the UN\u2019s insistence that Sinjar is still an Iraqi conflict, requiring mediation with national actors, overlooks transnational influence. In a more literal example of sticking to the borders, since 2020, the Baghdad government has embarked on building a physical wall along sections of the Iraq\u2013Syria border.10<\/a> But the wall has not stopped armed groups from moving unfettered between the two countries. Instead, the wall has had an impact on local communities on both sides of the border, for example, by limiting everyday access to basic goods. This paper thus examines the transnational character of the conflict in Sinjar with the aim of exploring a transnational approach that can complement national and local initiatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This research paper is part of the Iraq and the Levant case study investigated by Chatham House for the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research programme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The paper relies on primary sources collected through in-person and telephone interviews with leaders and members of the main organizations involved in the conflict in Sinjar, as well as with community leaders, ordinary citizens and independent analysts on both sides of the border in Sinjar and Syria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The authors conducted 40 research interviews between April and September 2023. This paper complements primary research with empirical information and analysis from secondary sources, including satellite images specially commissioned by Chatham House through XCEPT and Satellite Applications Catapult, descriptions of events offered in local and international media, as well as policy reports and academic scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Please Download for Full Text<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n ChathamHouse Sulaimaniye: How To Respond to instability in Iraq\u2019s Sinjar District Before Turkiye-Iraq-KRG Military Operation March 23, 2024 About the authors Dr. Zmkan Saleem is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Sulaimani. He is also an associate fellow at Chatham House and a senior researcher at the Institute of Regional and International Studies (IRIS). Dr Renad Mansour is a senior research fellow with the Middle East and North Africa […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-en","category-world-en"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marksizm.org.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marksizm.org.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marksizm.org.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marksizm.org.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marksizm.org.tr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3969"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/marksizm.org.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3976,"href":"https:\/\/marksizm.org.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3969\/revisions\/3976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marksizm.org.tr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marksizm.org.tr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marksizm.org.tr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}