The challenges facing the Kurdish people

Friday 30 January 2026

The Kurdish people rarely have the luxury of facing only one crisis at a time. In Iraq and Syria their political space has always been conditional: tolerated when they are useful, curtailed when they appear inconvenient, and attacked when their enemies judge the costs to be low. Contemporary events have compressed these old patterns into an acute set of challenges, some military, some constitutional, and some humanitarian, all of them mutually reinforcing.

In Syria the central question is whether Kurdish self-government in the north-east will survive the state’s return. For a decade the Kurdish-led administration built institutions in the shadow of war: local councils, security forces, courts, schools and a rudimentary economy, all under the protective umbrella of an international campaign against the Islamic State. That arrangement is now under direct strain. Damascus is pressing, by negotiation and by force, to absorb Kurdish civilian and military structures into the state. Recent reporting describes renewed talks over the integration of the Syrian Democratic Forces, after missed deadlines and a flare-up of fighting that has displaced large numbers of civilians and placed Kurdish-held areas under intense pressure. 

For ordinary Kurdish families in places such as Kobani, this is not an abstract constitutional dispute. It is a matter of whether the electricity returns, whether the water runs, whether the roads are safe enough to travel, whether a young man will be conscripted into a force that does not represent his community, and whether the local police will answer to local elders or distant ministries. Humanitarian access, which is often treated as a technical detail by diplomats, becomes a measure of dignity: aid convoys are now news because the basics of life have again become contingent upon ceasefires that might not last. 

The second Syrian challenge is security, and specifically the risk that the Islamic State will exploit Kurdish vulnerability. The Kurdish-led forces have for years guarded prisons and camps holding accused Islamic State members and their families. In a stable polity, this would be a burdensome but manageable task shared with an international coalition. In a shifting polity, it becomes a strategic hostage. Recent arrangements to transfer detainees from Syria to Iraq are framed as an emergency measure to prevent prison breaks and renewed insurgency amid the fighting. But any movement of detainees carries its own risks, including retaliation, escape, legal ambiguity and radicalisation within overstretched detention systems. 

The camps themselves are a moral indictment of the region’s inability to close the Islamic State chapter without storing its human consequences behind barbed wire. Human Rights Watch has reported shortages and insecurity in al-Hol during the recent escalation, including blocked aid, raids and looting, while other humanitarian reporting captures the fear felt by minorities, including Kurds and Yazidis, as front lines and administrative control shift.  The Kurdish predicament is that, in the eyes of many external actors, their legitimacy is still bound to the fight against a terrorist enemy. The moment that fight appears less central than state-building, border management, or regional bargains, Kurdish political claims are treated as optional.

In Iraq, the Kurdish challenge is different in form but similar in logic. The Kurdistan Region has recognised institutions, elections and a federal status, yet its autonomy is tethered to finance, oil and disputed territories. The recurrent dispute with Baghdad over budget transfers, salary payments and the authority to export oil is not mere bookkeeping. It is the mechanism by which the federal centre can discipline the periphery, and by which the periphery can attempt to preserve a degree of sovereign leverage. Reports over the past year have tracked how these disputes persist into 2026, with public-sector salaries and basic services repeatedly caught in the argument. 

Oil is the sharpest edge of this dependency. The stop-start politics of exports through the pipeline to Türkiye have exposed how Kurdish fiscal stability can be switched on and off by court rulings, state-to-state bargaining and rival claims about constitutional authority. Commentary on the 2025 Baghdad–Erbil oil deal underlines that even when flows resume, the arrangement can reduce Kurdish discretion by placing sales under federal mechanisms, offering a lifeline while tightening the centre’s grip. For Kurdish citizens, this translates into delayed salaries, reduced investment, a struggling private sector and a slow corrosion of faith that autonomy delivers competent governance.

Yet Iraq’s Kurdish politics are also burdened from within. A region that must continually negotiate with Baghdad also must negotiate with itself: between parties, between provinces, between the legacy networks of an older leadership and a younger electorate that is impatient with patronage. When money is scarce, internal rivalries harden. When money returns, it is often distributed through party structures that reward loyalty rather than competence. This is not uniquely Kurdish, but the Kurds endure it with the additional handicap of permanent strategic insecurity.

Over all of this lies the regional military environment, especially the Kurdish question as seen from Ankara. Türkiye’s long-running conflict with the PKK continues to shape events on both sides of the Iraqi and Syrian borders. International Crisis Group reporting has described Turkish military operations on Iraqi soil as justified by Ankara on the basis of PKK sanctuaries in the north, a reality that places Iraqi Kurds in a perilous position: they may oppose the PKK, yet they cannot escape the consequences of being geographically adjacent to it. In Syria, the same problem appears in a different costume, with Kurdish forces repeatedly pressured to distance themselves from PKK-linked cadres as part of any settlement designed to appease Türkiye.

These external pressures create a Kurdish dilemma that is strategic and psychological. If Kurdish movements compromise too far, they risk losing the very autonomy that gives their politics meaning. If they resist too openly, they may invite a level of military force they cannot match, particularly when great powers are ambivalent. The United States, which for years provided military support to Kurdish-led forces against the Islamic State, now appears focused on stabilisation and prisoner transfers, mediating between parties rather than underwriting Kurdish political ambitions. For Kurdish communities, mediation can feel like abandonment when it is coupled with a shrinking appetite for long-term protection.

There is also a humanitarian and demographic challenge that rarely receives strategic treatment but shapes everything: displacement. Kurdish towns in Syria have repeatedly absorbed waves of people fleeing violence elsewhere, then later become the source of displacement themselves. The present escalation has again pushed large numbers from their homes, and the recurring pattern of flight and return erodes property rights, schooling, health care, and the continuity of civic life. Once a population becomes mobile, it is easier for others to redraw the political map over its head.

The most dangerous Kurdish challenge is that all these pressures are converging. Fiscal constraint in Iraq weakens the Kurdistan Region’s capacity to act as a safe haven, an economic magnet, or a diplomatic platform. Political uncertainty and military pressure in Syria threaten to dismantle Kurdish institutions precisely when the Islamic State detainee problem requires maximum administrative competence. Regional actors pursue their own interests, and Kurdish factions are tempted to seek external patrons, which in turn deepens suspicion of Kurdish intentions and provides justification for coercion.

What, then, is the plausible Kurdish objective in the near term? It is unlikely to be statehood, and it may not even be stable autonomy in the maximal sense. It is more modest and more urgent: preserving enough institutional continuity that Kurdish communities remain governable by consent rather than by fear. In Iraq that means predictable finance, a workable constitutional bargain, and a reduction in the use of salary payments as a political weapon. In Syria it means a settlement that protects local administration, language and communal security, rather than a purely symbolic integration that dissolves Kurdish capacity without guaranteeing Kurdish rights.

The tragedy, and the warning, is that the Kurdish question is not merely a Kurdish question. When Kurdish governance collapses, vacuums open. Armed groups recruit. Borderlands become smuggling corridors. Prison systems fail. Displaced families move again. And neighbouring states, sheathed in their own nationalist certainties, inherit a more combustible region. The Kurds have often been asked to serve as the region’s infantry in the fight against extremism. Their present demand is simpler: not to be punished for having built a life in the gaps left by other people’s wars.