Masters Thesis

Halting ISIS: Kurdish military resistance against the Islamic State

The Kurdish Peshmerga of Northern Iraq have been successful in their fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). This comes as a surprise due to an initial defeat suffered against ISIS at the onset of the war as well as the militant group's military success against the Syrian and Iraqi armies. A general consensus in analytic and academic circles suggests the Peshmerga's success came from foreign military assistance and combat air support from a western led coalition. Other militaries, however, have been ousted by foes despite the presence of the same type of support. This paper seeks to explain why the Kurds in Iraq were able to successfully use foreign military assistance by analyzing the implications of strong governance, ethno-political motivations, and the crossing of a psychological barrier that forced the Kurdistan Regional Government and its army to engage a foreign threat in a conflict that posed an existential threat to the very existence of a self-governing Kurdish zone of autonomy on the internal use and allocation of aid.

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