People & Histories
2014–2019

The war against ISIS: Sinjar and Kobani

The Islamic State's onslaught brings genocide to the Yazidis of Sinjar, a siege at Kobani that becomes a symbol of resistance, and makes Kurdish forces the West's main ground partner against ISIS.

Well established wargenocidereligiongreat powers

Mosul falls

In June 2014 the jihadist group calling itself the Islamic State (ISIS) seized Mosul, Iraq’s second city, as the Iraqi army disintegrated. Kurdish peshmerga moved into Kirkuk and other disputed areas the army had abandoned.

  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)
  • The Kurdish Quasi-State: Development and Dependency in Post-Gulf War Iraq — Denise Natali, Syracuse University Press (2010)
For a few weeks the Kurdistan Region seemed to have gained, but in August ISIS turned on it.

Sinjar and the Yazidi genocide

On 3 August 2014 ISIS attacked Sinjar, the heartland of the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority whose ancient faith ISIS declared to be devil-worship. The KDP peshmerga stationed there withdrew. Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled up Mount Sinjar, where they were trapped in the summer heat until US airstrikes and Kurdish fighters from Syria, the YPG, alongside the PKK, opened a corridor to safety.

Those who could not escape were rounded up. Men and older boys were massacred, women and girls were sold and enslaved, and boys were taken to be trained as fighters. A household survey published in 2017 estimated that about 3,100 Yazidis were killed and about 6,800 kidnapped in the space of days.

In June 2016 a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that ISIS was committing genocide against the Yazidis.
Years later, thousands of Yazidis remained missing, and many survivors still lived in camps.

Kobani

In September 2014 ISIS laid siege to Kobani, a Kurdish town on Syria’s border with Turkey. Its defenders, the YPG and the women’s units YPJ, were pushed back to a few districts, while Turkish tanks watched from across the border. From late September the US-led coalition bombed ISIS positions around the town, and in late October Turkey let a contingent of Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga pass through to help. On 26 January 2015 the Kurds declared the town liberated.

  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)
  • The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East — Harriet Allsopp, I.B. Tauris (2014)
Kobani became a worldwide symbol of resistance, and the start of a partnership between the US and Syrian Kurdish forces. In Turkey, protests by Kurds angry at the government’s stance in October 2014 turned deadly.
  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)

The long war

From 2015 the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), with Arab and other allies and US air power, drove ISIS out of north-eastern Syria, taking its capital Raqqa in 2017 and its last village, Baghouz, in March 2019. In Iraq, peshmerga fought alongside the Iraqi army in the campaign that retook Mosul in 2017.

  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)
Kurdish forces lost thousands of fighters. The SDF was left guarding camps and prisons holding tens of thousands of ISIS members and their families, a burden it carried largely alone.

The war remade the image of the Kurds abroad. Pictures of young women commanders and of Kobani’s ruins turned the Kurds, for a while, into the West’s favourite allies. Yet the alliance was always tactical, and when the fighting ended many Kurds felt the old pattern returning: needed in war, dispensable in peace.

  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)
  • No Friends but the Mountains: The Tragic History of the Kurds — John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, Viking (1992)

How it's seen
Common Kurdish view

Kurdish fighters, men and women, held the line against ISIS for the whole world, losing thousands of lives, and were then left to face Turkey and Damascus alone once the caliphate was gone.

  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)
  • The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East — Harriet Allsopp, I.B. Tauris (2014)

Many Yazidis' view

The genocide happened after the KDP peshmerga meant to protect Sinjar withdrew without warning, and many Yazidis felt abandoned by their Muslim neighbours, some of whom joined ISIS. Fighters from the PKK and Syrian YPG helped open an escape corridor from the mountain.

Turkish state view

The Syrian Kurdish YPG that defended Kobani is the PKK's Syrian branch, so arming it against ISIS meant arming a terrorist organisation on Turkey's border.

  • PKK — Republic of Türkiye, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
  • The Cambridge History of the Kurds — Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi (eds), Cambridge University Press (2021)

Why it matters today

Kurds

The war made Kurdish fighters, including women, world-famous, and gave Kurds in Syria and Iraq leverage they had never had. It also left deep wounds: thousands of Yazidis still missing, and bitter arguments over who abandoned whom. Many Kurds feel the West took their sacrifices and then left them exposed.