With the liberation of Mosul in July, Iraq again finds itself at a crossroads. The Islamic State (or ISIS) has lost its crown jewel, the seat from which it declared its so-called caliphate in 2014. For that, the credit goes to Iraqi government forces, the militias that make up the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), and the Kurdish peshmerga. A side effect of the peshmerga victories in the war against ISIS, however, has been an increase in the territory held by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) by around 40 percent since 2014. And, in turn, the Kurds have been further empowered to challenge the territorial integrity of Iraq.

Legally, the KRG continues to operate as a federal unit of the Iraqi national government, but a September 25 referendum for independence could set the Kurds on a trajectory toward sovereignty, something Iraqi Kurds overwhelmingly wanted in an unofficial referendum held in 2005. Both the upcoming referendum and issues of territorial control are already being hotly contested. Peshmerga views of the post-ISIS regional order—and the extent to which these views are unified—are therefore key to Iraq’s political future.

Experts often question the degree to which the Kurds of Iraq and their various peshmerga groups are united politically. The Kurdistan Region is split between the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). These parties fought a civil war against one another in the mid-1990s and have since maintained separate military and security forces. Despite recent moves toward integration, separate KDP- and PUK-aligned forces continue to predominate the peshmerga. These political armies add another layer of complexity to the already Byzantine mix of territorial struggles, hydrocarbon disputes, and militia politics playing out in the Kurdistan region. Complicating things further, the KDP and PUK have since fractionalized, most dramatically with the emergence of the Gorran (change) movement in 2009, which claims to disavow the entrenched and corrupt politics of the two traditional parties.