As ISIS Nears Defeat, Old Rivalries Flare Up With Oil at Stake
Armored vehicles of Iraqi forces enter the Bai Hassan oil facility after Peshmerga forces withdrew from the area in Kirkuk, Iraq, on Oct. 17, 2017.
Photographer: Hassan Ghaedi/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
In 2014, when Islamic State rushed into northern Iraq, the region’s rival factions and their international backers turned their attention to defeating the extremists despite old rivalries, sectarian divisions, and differing agendas. Three years later, as Islamic State nears defeat, having been expelled from its stronghold of Mosul and its self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa, many of those old rivalries and unaddressed grievances have burst back to the fore, threatening to further destabilize an already fractious region.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the disputed city of Kirkuk, where Iraqi federal forces loyal to the central government in Baghdad faced down Kurdish fighters for control over Iraq’s oldest producing oil field, named Baba Gurgur, or Father of Fire, by the Kurds in 1927. The long-standing struggle between the government in Baghdad and the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) reignited on Oct. 16 as Iraqi tanks entered the outskirts of the city of more than 1 million people.