Jamie Watt
In my first year here, a Kurdish friend told me that Kurds have no friends but the mountains. I took it for a proverb, the kind of old line people repeat and don’t take literally. It took me most of a decade to understand that he was describing a policy.
On September 30, the US-led coalition finishes its withdrawal from Iraq, and the Patriot and C-RAM batteries stationed in the Kurdistan Region go with it. Qasim al-Araji, security adviser to the Iraqi prime minister, confirmed it in Baghdad on September 7: coalition forces “will withdraw completely from Iraq,” under an agreement signed in 2024.
I am an American. Those were my country’s systems, and my country has been in the sky over Kurdistan since April 1991.
That spring, after the uprising failed, more than a million Kurds walked into the mountains with whatever they could carry and the clothes on their backs. Most of my friends who are old enough remember those horrible days. The no-fly zone that followed kept Iraqi aircraft out of the area north of the 36th parallel for twelve years, and the Region that exists today was built underneath it. In 2014, when the Islamic State came within an hour’s drive of Erbil, my country came back at the head of an anti-ISIS coalition. This year, when the drone attacks started, American and British air defense intercepted most of what was aimed at this city.
My country has left before. In 1975, it cut off support to the Kurdish revolt after a deal between Baghdad and Tehran, and the revolt collapsed within weeks. In 1991, it stood aside while the uprising was crushed, and only acted once the exodus was on television. In 2019, it pulled out of northeast Syria days before a Turkish offensive. The pattern is obvious.
So the thirtieth is nothing new.
The gap it leaves is real, and the Region has said so in its own words. Staff Lt. Gen. Bakhtiyar Mohammed, secretary-general of the Ministry of Peshmerga, told Rudaw this month that the Region’s assets “lack the capability to intercept advanced drones,” and that its airspace has no radar surveillance, no anti-aircraft capability, and no integrated air defense. The coalition, he said, has been “our eye in the sky.”
Since late February, the Kurdistan Region has been hit by more than 965 drones and missiles. Twenty-nine people have been killed and 138 wounded. The attacks did not stop with the ceasefire. On September 7, three Iranian drones hit a camp in Surdash, in Sulaymaniyah governorate, before dawn.
Air defense is Baghdad’s responsibility under the constitution. There has been little of it until now, but Baghdad has signed contracts with the United States, South Korea, and Turkey, and Prime Minister al-Zaidi has cut the delivery plan from six years to three. The stated purpose is to protect oil facilities and vital infrastructure nationwide. Whether that coverage includes Erbil is a question the Region has every right to keep asking.
The coalition’s years here bought time, and the Region used it. For twelve years, no Iraqi aircraft crossed the 36th parallel, and for most of the years since, someone else’s radar has watched this sky. In those years, Kurds wrote their own constitution, seated a parliament, built an international airport, opened universities, and raised a generation that has never lived under Saddam. This month the Ministry of Peshmerga finished registering more than 99 percent of its force, bringing the Peshmerga under one command. Last week, 1.75 million students went back to school on schedule, in a year when our homes were threatened by drones.
Look what has been accomplished.
No one knows whether the US military would come back if needed. But I’m struck that instead of waiting around for a promise of quiet skies or the aid of others, the Kurds have been steadily building stability and a future of their own.