By Ruwayda Mustafah
Aerial view of a park in Erbil, with the city skyline in the background. Source: Dextar Vision via Unsplash.
Across a turbulent eighteen months in the Middle East, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) has been one of the few places where the regional storm has been absorbed rather than amplified. As the Iran war reshaped energy markets and regional alliances, Syria moved through a fragile transition, and Baghdad recalibrated its federal arrangements, Erbil continued to function as an interlocutor that Washington, Ankara, Abu Dhabi, Brussels and even Tehran could still talk to. That role is not an accident of geography. It is the product of thirty-five years of institution-building since the exodus of 1991.
Yet it rests on a foundation that is once again being tested from within, and the question of whether the Iraqi Kurdistan Region holds together has become inseparable from what it can do abroad. Thirty-five years ago, Kurds were united. As the Cold War came to an end and a new US-led international order emerged, the Kurds benefited, leading to the creation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The Middle East is now being reshaped once again, but the Kurds lack the unity of 1991.
What Thirty-Five Years Built
The KRI’s contemporary history began with the hope of being a part of the liberal democratic world order. The Kuwait invasion led to the Kurdish 1991 uprising. However, the possible return of the Iraqi dictator regime following the liberation of all the KRI, including Kirkuk, sent more than a million Kurds fleeing toward the mountains and the Turkish and Iranian borders. The Kurds collectively chose exodus over subjugation to the former regime, and it was the international safe haven that followed which created the space for self-rule, one of the very few successful international interventions worldwide.
The first parliamentary elections were held in May 1992, and a regional administration took shape from almost nothing. The harder achievement came later. Between 1994 and 1998 the two principal parties fought a civil war that split the Kurdistan Region into two rival administrations, and it took the 1998 Washington Agreement and nearly a decade more before those administrations were formally reunified in 2005. The US-led Iraq invasion in 2003 helped the Kurds take advantage of the regional changes, once again collectively. The two ruling parties together, along with other Kurdish groups, secured the rights of the Kurds in the newly democratic constitution of Iraq, and ensured the federal system for the country.
The deeper backdrop to all of this, Anfal and the chemical attack on Halabja, is why cohesion is treated less as a preference than as a survival strategy. The central accomplishment of thirty-five years was not autonomy alone. It was the overcoming of division.
The Mechanics of Drift
That accomplishment is not self-sustaining, and the present moment illustrates why. More than eighteen months after the parliamentary elections of October 2024, in which no party secured a majority, a new regional cabinet has yet to be formed. The fault lines are structural rather than merely personal; separate financial legacies, parallel security histories, and a power-sharing settlement designed for a different electoral balance. The cost of prolonged drift is not abstract. Analysts at Chatham House have described the Kurdistan Region as dangerously exposed during the Iran war, its institutions stretched precisely when regional volatility demanded a coherent response.
What is notable, and easily missed, is that the case against division is not contested across the Kurdish spectrum. Senior figures in both leading parties have publicly rejected any return to a dual administration, with one describing the Kurdistan Region as the product of immense historical sacrifice. However, there are also voices that advocate for returning to two administrations if the current political deadlock is not resolved. The danger is not only that some are arguing for two administrations. It is that institutional paralysis can produce the effect without the intention.
Cohesion as Leverage Abroad
The link between internal cohesion and external standing is the part of the picture most often overlooked. The Kurdistan Region’s diplomatic weight has always rested on its ability to present a single, coherent position to the outside world. In the recent Atlantic Council conference on Iraq, US former officials clearly urged the Kurds to be united as they considered division to be one of the main political threats for the Kurds to protect their achievements and strengthen their region. That was visible at the 2026 Munich Security Conference, where the President of the Kurdistan Region, Nechirvan Barzani, held a sequence of meetings with the US Secretary of State, the Syrian transitional leadership and the commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces, and again in his engagements in Abu Dhabi, recently in Baghdad, and his exchanges with the European Commission.
Across those meetings ran a consistent formulation that one analysis summarised as unity paired with constitutional guarantees, a posture that rejects fragmentation without endorsing unchecked centralisation. The significant point is not the individual diplomacy but what it depends on. A Kurdistan Region that speaks with one voice can mediate between Damascus and its Kurds, reassure energy partners and act as a bridge to Baghdad. A fragmented one becomes an object of other actors’ bargaining rather than a participant in its own right.
The Stake
This is why the internal question matters far beyond the borders of the Kurdistan Region. Prolonged division would not only paralyse domestic governance; it would forfeit the standing abroad that three and a half decades of effort produced, and it would do so at a moment when the surrounding region offers little margin for self-inflicted weakness. The achievements of the past thirty-five years can feel permanent to those who do not understand those achievements are products of decades of sacrifices and chemical attacks on the Kurds. They are not. The generation that walked into the mountains in 1991 assembled a functioning self-government out of catastrophe, and the single thing they were determined never to repeat was the splitting of that government against itself.
Allowing the Kurdistan Region to drift back toward two administrations, even by inertia rather than design, would not register as a passing policy setback. It would be the undoing of the one achievement on which all the others rest. Cohesion is not the reward for getting everything else right. It is the precondition, and it has to be chosen again, more than ever, as the changing Middle East demands unity. 1990 and 2003 have already proved it is the only path to prosperity.
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