Among the latest U.S. troop casualties from Iranian attacks in the region was an American service member in Iraqi Kurdistan killed by unexploded ordnance from an Iranian drone targeting that autonomous region. It was merely the latest example of how drone attacks against that enclave, which has remained a noncombatant in the regional Iran war, have become a plague in recent years.
On Saturday, one day after an Iranian missile attack on Jordan killed two U.S. service members, a third was also killed in action in Iraqi Kurdistan “during a controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian one-way attack drone,” according to a U.S. Central Command statement. Another American service member suffered a minor injury during the second incident, the statement added.
The incident occurred almost a decade after the infamous Islamic State group first demonstrated its capability to use explosive-rigged drones when it flew one into a Kurdish position on October 2, 2016, killing two Peshmerga and injuring two French soldiers accompanying them. It foreshadowed what was to come over the next 10 years. Until that moment, the most lethal weapons ISIS used against Peshmerga positions were reinforced bomb-laden trucks, known as armored vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, which required anti-tank missiles to reliably destroy. Earlier in the ISIS war, Germany donated older MILAN anti-tank missiles that helped the Kurdish forces combat that deadly threat.
Years after that 2016 ISIS drone attack, Iraqi Kurdistan would find itself under fire from Iran-backed Iraqi Shia militias primarily targeting U.S. troops hosted at a base on the grounds of Erbil International Airport in the eponymous Iraqi Kurdish capital. These started with short-range rocket attacks in 2020 and quickly evolved into drone attacks by the following. Iran also executed perverse, unprovoked direct attacks against the private residences of wealthy Kurdish businessmen in Erbil using ballistic missiles, unprecedented acts of aggression against the Kurdish region, in March 2022 and January 2024. The regional wars that started in October 2023 also saw Iraqi Kurdistan come under repeated militia drone attacks targeting U.S. troops.
Then came the sustained attacks Iraqi Kurdistan endured throughout the Iran war. Despite the region emphasizing and reemphasizing its neutrality in that conflict, it nevertheless found itself under repeated fire by Tehran and Iran-backed militias. Coalition air defenses at Erbil airport largely protected the base and the city around it. Still, there were fatalities, including a French soldier serving in the coalition against ISIS on March 12.
Despite the April 8 ceasefire, frequent attacks continued against Iranian opposition groups in Iraqi Kurdistan. Beginning on July 15, residents of Erbil city once again heard drone intercepts for the first time since April. Between the start of the war on February 28 and July 17, the autonomous region came under fire from at least 904 drones and missiles, resulting in 29 deaths and 138 injuries.
After such traumatic, unprovoked attacks, Iraqi Kurdistan would doubtlessly welcome any opportunity to acquire air defenses for self-protection. Since it’s not a state, the landlocked region has long struggled to acquire the weapons it needs to defend its residents and territory against evolving threats.
Sixty-three years before Erbil faced daily drone attacks, the Kurdish Peshmerga were engaged in a very different war, the First Iraqi-Kurdish War, which the Kurds fought for their autonomy and self-rule. In 1963, the then-General Secretary of the leading Kurdistan Democratic Party, Ibrahim Ahmed, underlined the importance for the Kurds of acquiring anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. “If we had such weapons we could control the cities as well as the countryside and would then be able to set up our own autonomous region,” he said at the time.
The First Iraqi-Kurdish War lasted from 1961 until 1970, when the warring sides reached an autonomy agreement. Between then and the outbreak of the Second Iraqi-Kurdish War in 1974, the Peshmerga reorganized from a guerrilla force launching hit-and-runs into a more conventional army. Covert support by pre-revolutionary Imperial Iran, Israel, and the United States saw the Peshmerga finally equipped with Soviet-made SA-7 shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles and AT-3 Sagger anti-tank missiles. Israel had captured these portable systems in the October 1973 war with Egypt and Syria and covertly transferred them to the Kurds in return for equivalent American systems.
In an interesting episode during the 1974-75 war, the Peshmerga managed to shoot down an Iraqi MiG-19 fighter jet and capture its pilot, who was treated exceptionally humanely. However, their anti-tank and anti-air systems failed to make a decisive difference after the Shah of Iran suddenly yanked out Iran’s decisive support from under them and cut a deal with Baghdad, crushing Kurdish morale in the process. The rebellion and Iraqi Kurdistan’s brief hard-won autonomy swiftly collapsed in early 1975, with many Peshmerga fleeing to Iran for sanctuary.
During the 1980s, the lightly armed Peshmerga still fought the Saddam Hussein regime during the Iran-Iraq War. It was in that decade that the Iraqi Kurds suffered the most.
The Barzani Genocide of 1983 saw around 8,000 men and boys from that tribe abducted and murdered. None of their bodies were recovered until after the 2003 overthrow of Hussein’s regime. To this day, some are still being recovered from the deserts of southern Iraq decades after that crime against humanity.
The Anfal campaign later that decade was even worse. Up to 182,000 Kurds were slaughtered by Hussein’s forces, including 5,000 in one day in the infamous chemical attack on Halabja on March 16, 1988. In Jonathan C. Randall’s imperishable 1998 book, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters With Kurdistan, the author recalls asking Kurdish researcher Shoresh Resoul why the Peshmerga did not withdraw to Iran as they had in 1975. After all, at that time they faced up to 46 divisions compared to as little as eight in the 1970s, when they were much better equipped. Chillingly, Shoresh told him that in 1988 after Halabja, “all Kurds knew some areas had been gassed, but if we gave up we feared worse awaited our people. The Peshmerga mission changed from attacking Iraqis to trying to protect our people.”
It was no surprise that after these systematic and genocidal mass murders, Kurds fled en masse from their cities in March 1991 after Hussein moved to crush their uprising in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Soviet-made Iraqi helicopter gunships formed the spearhead of a brutal assault that saw millions of Kurdish civilians seek sanctuary in the mountains in harsh conditions. During that time, leading Kurdish politician Sami Abdul Rahman called on Western countries to supply the Peshmerga with FIM-92 Stinger anti-air and BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missiles to give these forces a fighting chance against Hussein’s ruthless gunships and armored columns.
Ultimately, the Western powers never provided these weapons but did establish a no-fly zone over Iraqi Kurdistan, enabling it to reestablish its autonomy that has since endured to this day.
In a January 1993 interview with the late journalist David Hirst, Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masoud Barzani acknowledged that his forces hadn’t even asked for anti-tank missiles “because we know that nobody will give them to us.” In that same interview, he said that Kurds may once again have to evacuate cities if the Iraqis bombarded them with Soviet-made Frog-7 surface-to-surface artillery rockets. Still, he pledged that “never again will the Peshmerga become refugees. If necessary we shall turn our land into a graveyard for them and for us.”
In the 33 years since then, the Peshmerga never became refugees again as Barzani vowed. In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq that finally deposed Hussein’s brutal regime, the U.S. enlisted the support of the Kurds, suggesting it would even provide advanced FGM-148 Javelin “fire-and-forget” anti-tank missiles. The Kurds’ participation proved decisive, but they never received any Javelins. In the end they settled for seizing some of Hussein’s Soviet-era T-54/55 and T-62 tanks that the collapsing Iraqi Army abandoned instead of fighting the Americans for that dictator one last time.
Years later, in 2012, Barzani would express trepidation about Iraq, then under the divisive Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, acquiring American F-16 fighter jets to rebuild its air force. Barzani feared Maliki may use them against Kurdistan. He even mentioned past threats posed by MiGs like that MiG-19 the Peshmerga shot down in 1974. Ultimately, no Iraqi F-16s, which the country began receiving in 2015 after Maliki stepped down, have been used against the autonomous region.
Iran did claim in this year’s war that Erbil was one of the targets of its air force during the offensive its fighters took in the first days of the war, although this remains unconfirmed. Either way, the bulk of its attacks against Iraqi Kurdistan consisted of drones fired either by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran or its various militia proxies in Iraq, which also used Iraqi territory to attack the Gulf states to the south.
Today, Iraqi Kurdistan is once again in urgent need of air defenses. While U.S.-led coalition troops are, as mentioned above, providing some defense of Erbil against present threats, they are scheduled to leave by September 30. They may leave behind some point-defense systems to protect critical American infrastructure like the enormous U.S. consulate in Erbil, but Iraqi Kurdistan needs much more.
Interestingly, Iraq’s new government recently pledged to deploy air defenses to protect vital energy sites in Kurdistan against repeated militia drone attacks.
Given this history, if Iraq does ultimately end up protecting Kurdistan’s airspace, and that’s definitely a big if, that would certainly be one for the books.
