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The End of Iraqi Kurdistan’s Experiment with a Unified Region?
The PUK, dominated by the Talabani family and controlling the southeastern half of the Kurdistan Region, has decided to withdraw from the KRG cabinet and pursue the establishment of a separate federal region centred on Sulaimani.
According to a well-placed source in Sulaimani, the PUK leadership made the decision today, marking a potentially historic turning point in the two-decade experiment to govern Iraqi Kurdistan as a unified region.
The decision follows more than two years of political deadlock since the October 2024 regional elections, the first held since 2018. The immediate trigger was yesterday's move by the KDP, dominated by the Barzani family, to unilaterally reconvene the Kurdistan Parliament, which had not met since its inaugural session on 2 December 2024.
The KDP secured the 51-MP quorum in the 100-seat chamber by attracting individual MPs from rival factions, despite those parties officially boycotting the session. It has now decided to press ahead with forming a new cabinet without the PUK, a move that would shut the PUK out of the regional executive it has shared with the KDP since 2006.
The prospect of a formal split has been building for years. At the heart of the crisis is the governing style of KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani of the KDP, who has increasingly sought to concentrate power in his own hands at the expense of the region's deeply entrenched power-sharing arrangements. Yet the Kurdistan Region is structurally divided into two zones, making such centralisation extremely difficult without the consent of the PUK.
The PUK has maintained de facto control over Sulaimani and surrounding areas since the Kurdish civil war of the 1990s, which resulted in two separate administrations. Even after their formal reunification in 2006, the region remained unified largely in name. In practice, the KDP and PUK retained separate security forces, intelligence agencies and administrative structures in their respective territories. The unified government rested on an arrangement between two competing centres of power whose institutions were never genuinely integrated.
Article 119 of Iraq's Constitution allows one or more governorates to initiate the formation of a federal region through a referendum, following a request supported by either one-third of the relevant governorate council members or 10% of registered voters. Under Iraq's 2008 Law on Executive Procedures for Forming Regions, the voter-initiated process begins with an initial petition supported by 2% of voters, followed by a registration process to reach the 10% threshold. Once the signatures are validated, Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission refers the request to the federal Council of Ministers, which sets the date of the referendum.
For much of the past three decades, Iraqi Kurdistan has operated as two competing centres of power, a division institutionalised by the civil war and left largely intact by the 2006 reunification.
The latest confrontation now threatens to transform that longstanding de facto division into a formal constitutional and territorial split. If the PUK proceeds, it could mark the end of Iraqi Kurdistan's two-decade experiment with a unified regional government.
More: thenationalcontext.com/puk-t…
The PKK’s jailed founder, Abdullah Ocalan, has reportedly been moved to a new house-style building near the prison compound on İmralı island, where he has been held since 1999.
The move carries symbolic weight for the peace process, since improving Ocalan’s conditions of detention has been one of the PKK’s demands. It falls well short of house arrest or conditional release, but it may be the first step in a multi-stage process.
Ocalan is also expected to take on a role in the process, such as disarmament or peace coordinator, though he has not yet been given a formal position.
According to both pro-PKK and Turkish media, the new building includes a room for video conferencing and space to receive guests, among other facilities.
The improvement in Ocalan’s conditions might clear the way for further steps by the PKK and the Turkish government towards implementing a law passed by the Turkish parliament and allowing some PKK fighters to return to Turkey.
The emerging regional peace process, which Ocalan’s camp calls “democratic integration” and Ankara calls a “terror-free region”, is helping to elevate Ocalan to the status of a regional power broker. For Ocalan and much of the pro-PKK Kurdish movement, the process offers a chance to convert an exhausted guerrilla war and a precarious autonomous pocket in Syria into de facto Kurdish unification and codified regional influence.
The elevation of Ocalan’s status has practical as well as symbolic weight. If the Turkish parliament, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and PKK-affiliated groups such as the Yazidi Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS) in Iraq and the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK) in Iran all treat İmralı as the necessary address, then for the first time there would be a single recognised leadership centre for Kurds in Turkey and northern Syria, for pockets of Iraq and for one of the main Iranian Kurdish groups. Borders would remain on the map, but in terms of political gravity, a cross-border Kurdish space would begin to cohere under Ocalan’s authority.
More on Ocalan’s re-emergence as the centre of gravity in Kurdish regional politics: thenationalcontext.com/abdul…
For Ankara, the process is a way to end a draining conflict on terms that strengthen its power. Increasingly important is the fear that Kurdish actors could become a permanent asset in an Israel-centred regional camp, especially in Syria, where Turkey cannot simply eliminate the SDF without risking a protracted and destabilising war. Nor can it indefinitely tolerate a PKK-derived army on its border that the US, and potentially Israel, can use as leverage. The path being explored instead is to change the SDF’s status and patronage by integrating its forces into the new Syrian army and security institutions; stripping out, on paper at least, the overt PKK command spine; and shifting its long-term horizon away from Washington and any Israeli security nexus, towards a Turkey-centred regional order.
More on how the Israel factor is driving Ankara and Ocalan to converge on a broader regional realignment: thenationalcontext.com/the-t…
The Iran War Could Decide What Kind of Ruler al-Sharaa Becomes
As the Hormuz crisis continues, Syria is facing a growing fuel and electricity crisis, driven by rising oil prices, increasing sabotage and dwindling Gulf financial support.
One consequence of the Hormuz crisis is that Syria’s electricity supply, which had been improving since President Ahmad al-Sharaa came to power, is deteriorating again. Reports now indicate that some areas receive as little as five hours. The state electricity company has acknowledged longer cuts, citing reduced gas supplies. This comes after the government raised electricity tariffs by up to six-fold in late 2025, presenting the increase as necessary to sustain the improvement. Syrians are now paying more for less power.
Petrol and diesel shortages are also worsening in Aleppo, Idlib and other cities, driven by higher oil prices and stronger competition for supplies during the Hormuz crisis. Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries have added to the pressure by pushing Moscow to restrict fuel exports. This matters because Syria has relied heavily on Russia this year, importing around 60,000 barrels of oil a day, a dependence Damascus has agreed to reduce in talks with Washington. In September, the government also raised diesel prices by 40%, triggering the most widespread protests since the fall of former president Bashar al-Assad.
The Iran war has also plunged Gulf economies into crisis, particularly Qatar and Saudi Arabia, both important financial backers of Damascus. Qatar’s LNG exports have been largely halted by the closure of Hormuz, and Saudi Arabia recorded its largest quarterly deficit in nearly eight years in the first quarter. A Syrian official has said that pledged Gulf funds have been frozen since the war began.
At the same time, sabotage against energy infrastructure has increased. Energy Minister Mohammad al-Bashir told parliament in September that oil pipelines had been attacked 22 times this year. A blast on a gas line near Damascus on 30 September took three power plants offline.
Together, these pressures are placing perhaps the first serious domestic strain on al-Sharaa. After the civil war, consolidating his power depended on quick improvements to the daily services that most directly affect people’s lives. The reversal of those gains, combined with a deepening economic crisis, could erode his popularity and make it easier for groups with an interest in weakening him to recruit. For the first time, the public mood appears to be shifting against him, with the September fuel protests spreading to areas generally considered supportive of the new authorities.
Despite this, al-Sharaa has continued to rebuild the army. Reports estimate its strength at around 200,000, with plans to expand it to 300,000. Defence and national security account for about a third of planned spending in the 2026 budget. The army is also being reorganised into five regional corps, a restructuring designed to bring former factions more firmly under central command.
If the Iran war continues and oil prices keep rising, Syria’s situation could deteriorate considerably, leaving al-Sharaa in an increasingly fragile position. His investment in the army, however, could produce an ironic outcome. As the crisis erodes his popular support, he may consolidate power further through the security and coercive apparatus he is bringing under his direct control.
More details: thenationalcontext.com/the-h…
As Its Affiliates Integrate Into Host States, the PKK’s Regional Network Could Grow Stronger
The PKK’s regional integration in Syria and Iraq, alongside its peace process with Turkey, points to a two-layered arrangement.
At the national level, its affiliated groups are giving up part of their separate organisational identities by integrating into the states in which they operate. In return, they gain recognition and potentially substantial influence in their local areas, creating a form of indirect decentralisation. At the regional level, they remain part of a single network that recognises the imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan as its leader.
In some ways this arrangement has no precedent in the century since the partition of the Ottoman Empire. Kurdish rebellions and movements in these countries have historically had their own local leadership and organisational structures. The PKK’s network is following a different model, in which its affiliates give up some of their autonomy through integration while potentially becoming legally recognised entities within their respective states.
Critics argue that this amounts to abandoning Kurdish national distinctiveness by accepting integration into existing state structures, whether in Syria, among the Yazidis of Sinjar, or in Turkey, where the movement is negotiating within the framework of the Turkish state. This reading overlooks another dimension. These groups may retain substantial local influence even as they surrender wider political and military autonomy. By placing significant numbers of their personnel inside state institutions, they could keep influence over local administration and security without controlling territory of their own. Their power would increasingly operate through local structures and identities, replacing the autonomous, state-like entities they previously ran.
Critics read this as a retreat from Kurdish nationalism. It can also be read as a pragmatic adaptation to the region’s political realities. Under almost any other arrangement, it would be hard to imagine a single Kurdish leader holding influence over several legally recognised organisations operating in three or more states.
This model could therefore make the PKK’s regional network more influential than at any point in its history. Its affiliates, which have long operated on the margins as outlawed organisations, could become recognised actors within existing states, exercising varying degrees of institutional and local influence while remaining connected through a common regional leadership.
More details: thenationalcontext.com/integ…
On the protests in Syria’s Hasakah and the latest on the SDF-Damascus integration agreement
As integration on the ground moves into more advanced stages, instability is growing, most visibly in the recent protests by a segment of the Arab population in Hasakah city.
Part of the issue is the gap between the media narrative and what is actually happening on the ground, which is complicating an already difficult process.
As this map shows, Hasakah city is highly mixed, though Arabs are likely the majority. As the largest single demographic group, Arabs have a greater incentive to escalate their demands in order to secure more, and the protests have largely originated in southern Hasakah.
One reason Arabs in this part of the city are increasingly able to mobilize is the distinct role of the Ghuwayran neighbourhood, where most of the activity is taking place. Densely populated and overwhelmingly Arab, Ghuwayran has historically served as an intellectual base for the city’s Arabs, which makes its residents far more readily mobilized.
The recent return of many pro-Damascus activists, including some who took part in the revolution alongside Ahmad al-Sharaa, and other opposition figures, has made mobilization easier. These activists are better organized and less fearful, partly because they live in the city’s almost exclusively Arab south, where the SDF has far less ability to cause them problems.
This complicates the SDF’s long-term aim of keeping control of the city.
Another complicating factor is how the SDF and the Syrian government are each presenting events on the ground. The two sides are pursuing very different media strategies.
The SDF has a network of journalists and activists publishing near-identical material, which suggests a centrally coordinated operation feeding them messages. This network is inflating SDF appointments, which in turn is leading many Arabs to believe the city and the province, has been handed over to the SDF.
Recent judicial appointments are a good example. Anyone following pro-SDF activists would assume the SDF has secured most of the judicial posts. In context, it has received significantly fewer than it appears, less than half of the appointments.
At the Hasakah city judicial palace, four of the 11 SDF-affiliated judges accepted across the province have begun work, in a city expected to have 25 judges in total. It remains unclear how many of the 11 will ultimately be assigned to Hasakah city.
The province’s Attorney General (al-Muhami al-Amm) is also a government appointee.
Even so, SDF media has presented the appointment of the 11 judges, together with another 20 who will undergo judicial training in Damascus, as a form of continuity, which has caused alarm among many Arabs in the province.
Hasakah province will have at least 65 judges, and potentially as many as 85. These appointments matter for the SDF, given how long it has operated outside the state, but in context they are less significant than SDF media suggests.
This framing is provoking the Arab side and feeding the impression that everything has been surrendered to the SDF. The government’s near silence has only deepened anxiety among these Arab segments.
The government’s approach appears to be to work quietly, implementing changes on the ground and extending control incrementally. Facing a growing set of problems across the country with limited resources, it has a vested interest in moving slowly in Hasakah, which has left the SDF to dominate the narrative. In practice, however, it is the SDF that has been steadily losing influence on the ground. It therefore makes sense for the SDF to run a media strategy that frames integration as a win-win and plays down its loss of control.
Security appointments follow the same pattern. Around two-thirds of senior security appointments in Hasakah have gone to the government side and one-third to the SDF, yet the Arab protesters remain dissatisfied.
Part of the reason is a combination of panic and an element of racism. Some protesters may genuinely feel they are losing ground to the SDF and that SDF has been legitimized. Another section is driven by racism and cannot accept a Kurd holding any post in Hasakah. Both attitudes are feeding what is happening.
The danger is that the situation is becoming more delicate. In a city as mixed as Hasakah, the ongoing security transition has effectively produced two parallel security structures, raising the risk of clashes and wider violence.
Security is gradually coming under greater government control, but the SDF still has a large number of people on the ground, both officially and unofficially.
Around 8,000 Asayish personnel, the security forces on the SDF side, have recently been incorporated into the Syrian Interior Ministry’s internal security structure in Hasakah. Of these, around 5,000 are Kurdish and approximately 3,000 are Arab.
The government has also been gradually deploying more of its own internal security forces to Hasakah. The exact number remains unclear, but it is likely now well over a thousand and rising.
More: thenationalcontext.com/hasak…
Was the Arab Belt as Big as Syrian Kurds Remember?
A district-level count of the 1970s Ghamr resettlement, carried forward to 2026, shows a programme that left a deep mark on a narrow strip along the Turkish border but a limited one on the province as a whole. Most of Hasakah's ethnic and religious diversity predates it.
The Arab Belt project of 1974, which aimed to Arabise a narrow strip of Syria's border with Turkey and Iraq in Hasakah province, has returned to the centre of Kurdish politics in northeast Syria.
Kurdish parties and rights groups want it included in Syria's transitional justice process, while Kurdish landowners in Malikiyah (Dêrik), Jawadiyah (Çil Axa) and Darbasiyah (Dirbêsiyê) are pressing to recover fields allocated in the 1970s to Arab families displaced by the Euphrates Dam, known locally as the Ghamr ("the flooded").
Behind the land claims lies a wider belief, common in Kurdish media and party literature, that Arabisation is the main reason Hasakah province is as mixed as it is today. Kurdish outlets routinely describe the Belt as the largest demographic change in Syria's history.
TNC reconstructed the programme settlement by settlement, matched each colony to its subdistrict, and compared the results with the 2004 census and a June 2026 humanitarian population count. The figures support part of that belief and contradict the rest.
A village-by-village register compiled by a Kurdish researcher in Qamishli lists 38 settlements, 3,977 families and 721,531 dunums of allotted land. French and German fieldwork from 1980 and 1990, summarised in an academic study of land distribution in the Jazira, recorded 41 villages, 4,600 families settled between 1974 and 1977, between 25,000 and 27,000 people, and 72,000 hectares of land, equivalent to 720,000 dunums.
At the time of settlement, the 25,000 to 27,000 Ghamr settlers were equivalent to 5.3% to 5.8% of Hasakah's population at the 1970 census of 468,506.
The war has since reduced those shares considerably. A June 2026 population baseline compiled by the UN migration agency from local informants provides counts for every colony that could be located. The 17 colonies with figures for both years had 22,870 residents in 2004 and 11,765 in 2026, a fall of about half, while the province as a whole, including people displaced into it from elsewhere, had about 1.39 million residents.
Counting only the resident populations of the colonies, Ghamr villages now account for about 10% of Jawadiyah's population, 6.5% in Qahtaniyah, 5% to 7% in Ras al-Ayn, 5% to 6% in Ya'rubiyah and Darbasiyah, under 3% in Amuda and Malikiyah, and 1% to 2% in Qamishli.
Across the eight border subdistricts, the share is about 3% to 4%, and across the province, about 2%.
Read the full analysis putting the Arab Belt project into context:
thenationalcontext.com/arab-…
Syria could soon receive around 1,000 Iraqi crude oil tanker trucks daily, in addition to the roughly 1,000 trucks already transporting Iraqi fuel oil through the country, under an agreement that could take effect this month.
Youssef Qiblawy, head of the state-owned Syrian Petroleum Company, said on 7 October that negotiations with Baghdad were nearing completion and that Syria would provide storage at Baniyas before the crude is shipped abroad.
Qiblawy expects crude shipments to match or exceed existing fuel oil traffic. At roughly 220 barrels per truck, the new route could carry 220,000 barrels daily, bringing the combined volume of Iraqi petroleum transiting Syria to around 440,000 barrels per day.
Iraq's seaborne crude exports recovered to an estimated 2.57 million barrels per day in September, but at a high price. To attract tankers into the Gulf, Iraq's state oil marketer, SOMO, is offering October-loading Basrah Medium at a discount of $34.50 per barrel to destination benchmarks and Basrah Heavy at $37.
The Syrian route carries its own transport costs, and Baghdad has not disclosed the transit fees. However, if trucking, handling and transit charges remain sufficiently below the discounts offered on Gulf shipments, exports through Baniyas could yield higher returns for Iraq despite the route's limited capacity.
For Syria, the expansion could bring substantial economic benefits. At estimated transit charges of $1–2 per barrel, the additional crude shipments alone could generate $80–160 million annually, with combined crude and fuel oil transit revenue potentially reaching $160–320 million at full capacity. These illustrative figures exclude any separately charged storage, port handling and other services.
Beyond direct revenue, thousands of daily truck movements could stimulate local economies. Although drivers are predominantly Iraqi, their spending on food, accommodation, vehicle maintenance and other services would benefit Syrian businesses, supporting employment and further local spending.
For Syria, rebuilding after years of conflict, the arrangement offers a growing opportunity to capitalise on its position as a transit corridor linking Iraq to the Mediterranean, generating both government revenue and wider economic activity.
More: thenationalcontext.com/plann…
According to a new survey by Iraq's Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies, Iran's favourability in Iraq continues to rise and has reached an all-time high of 57%, against 37% for the US.
The trend is more notable still. In early 2024, Iran was becoming deeply unpopular, with favourability at just 20% against 31% for the US, giving the US an 11-point lead. Iran's favourability began to climb after the Israel-Hezbollah war, the fall of Bashar al-Assad and later the Israel-Iran war, as Iraq's Shia population felt increasingly encircled and under threat. Much of the rise is therefore likely concentrated in the Shia south. This is the first survey conducted since the February 28 war.
This consolidation of Iran's favourability among Shias, part of a rising trajectory also captured by other surveys in 2025, has likely helped Shia armed factions resist disarmament despite mounting US pressure.
It is further evidence for an argument The National Context has made before: much of the commentary often fails to measure Iranian influence in Iraq properly.
Iranian statecraft was built under decades of sanctions and intelligence pressure, and it developed accordingly: strategic ambiguity, layered signalling, delayed response. Concealment and a passive posture are standing instruments of how Tehran operates when it is being watched. An analyst who reads a quiet period as decline is treating a deliberate tool of Iranian statecraft as evidence against it. Any serious measurement of influence therefore has to separate what Iran and its partners can do from what they currently choose to display. Visible activity is an output that responds to pressure, incentives and instruction. The underlying stock of influence, meaning parliamentary weight, institutional integration, social base and public attitudes, has to be measured on its own terms.
Assessments of Iran's regional position routinely group Iraq's pro-Iran factions with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Those are non-state actors whose value to Iran lies in armed disruption. The main pro-Iran factions in Iraq sit inside the state itself: in parliament, in ministries and on the public payroll through the Popular Mobilisation structures. Their obligations, exposure and utility are of a different kind.
That difference defines what Iraq is worth to Tehran. Iraq's value lies in remaining unsanctioned, solvent and internationally connected. A sanctioned, broken Iraq offers Iran very little. In this war, Iran's binding constraint is economic survival, and a functioning neighbour that indirectly provides trade and commercial depth matters more to it than an additional source of hard power, which Iran already supplies for itself and to which Iraqi factions could add little. The Iraqi factions contribute through the economic and social arena, including manpower and mobilisation through their social base.
This is why those who argue that Iran's influence has declined are measuring the wrong variable. Visible militia activity has fallen because Iraq's value to Iran under wartime sanctions and a Hormuz blockade depends on Iraq staying solvent, unsanctioned and connected, and because Iranian statecraft defaults to concealment under pressure. Every structural indicator, from a record parliamentary position to a documented recovery in Shia public opinion to the collapse of the only movement that ever genuinely eroded Iran's standing, shows an influence that is more consolidated, more institutionally embedded and more socially anchored than at any point since the ISIS era.
More: thenationalcontext.com/irans…
How to measure Iranian influence in Iraq - and whether it is declining
A growing body of commentary holds that Iranian influence in Iraq is in decline. The claim rests on visible changes in behaviour: fewer militia attacks, public distancing from Tehran, quiet acceptance of American demands. The conclusion does not follow from the evidence. It rests on a measurement error, and the error is compounded by three factors: the character of Iranian statecraft, a category mistake about what Iraq is within Iran's regional system, and a wartime economic environment in which restraint is the rational instruction.
The measurement problem: Iranian statecraft was built under decades of sanctions and intelligence pressure, and it developed accordingly: strategic ambiguity, layered signalling, delayed response. Concealment and passive posture are standing instruments of how Tehran operates when it is being watched. An analyst who reads a quiet period as decline is treating a deliberate tool of Iranian statecraft as evidence against it. Any serious measurement of influence therefore has to separate what Iran and its partners can do from what they currently choose to display. Visible activity is an output that responds to pressure, incentives and instruction. The underlying stock of influence, meaning parliamentary weight, institutional integration, social base and public attitudes, has to be measured on its own terms.
Iraq is a state asset, and the comparison to Hezbollah misleads: Assessments of Iran's regional position routinely group Iraq with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Those are non-state actors whose value to Iran lies in armed disruption. The main pro-Iran factions in Iraq sit inside the state itself: in parliament, in ministries, on the public payroll through the Popular Mobilisation structures. Their obligations, exposure and utility are of a different kind.
That difference defines what Iraq is worth to Tehran. Iraq's value lies in remaining unsanctioned, solvent and internationally connected. A sanctioned, broken Iraq offers Iran very little. In this war, Iran's binding constraint is economic survival, and a functioning neighbour that indirectly helps with trade and commercial depth which matters more to it than an additional source of hard power, which Iran already supplies for itself and which Iraqi factions could add little to. The contribution of the Iraqi factions runs through the economic and social arena, including manpower and mobilisation through their social base.
The wartime economy makes restraint the rational order: This is the context in which the current quiet has to be read. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has placed Iraq in an existential position: roughly 90 percent of state revenue comes from oil, and about 90 percent of that oil moved through Hormuz. The revenue base of the salary state has collapsed. On top of this, Washington holds a structural instrument dating to the post-invasion settlement: Iraq's oil revenue is held at the Federal Reserve, which gives the United States the capacity to strangle Iraqi state finance by administrative decision.
Under these conditions, restraint by the pro-Iran factions preserves the asset. Provoking sanctions or a financial cutoff would destroy the very thing that makes Iraq valuable to Iran. The observed quiet is what the protection of a strategic asset looks like under maximum coercion, and it is fully consistent with instructed discipline from Tehran.
The regional picture reinforces the logic on both sides. Iraq's western frontier is now exposed to a Sunni government in Damascus under Ahmad al-Sharaa. Turkey sits to the north and Saudi Arabia to the south. At the strategic level, Iran is the only ally Shia-led Iraq has left in the region, and Iraq is the last open flank Iran has left. Each side's dependence on the other has increased, and that mutual dependence raises the cost of any behaviour that would jeopardise Iraq's international standing and hence its own internal cohesion.
What the observable record actually shows: Once measurement shifts from visible activity to structural indicators, the record points in one direction.
The 2025 elections delivered the pro-Iran Shia coalition its strongest result since 2003. The Coordination Framework bloc won at least 170 of 329 seats, 52 percent of parliament, even with the Sadrist boycott. Candidates directly linked to Iran-aligned militias took over 80 seats across multiple lists, the highest figure on record, in an election where turnout rebounded by more than 10 points from the previous cycle.
Public attitudes have moved in the same direction. Gallup finds approval of Iran's leadership among Iraqi Shias rising from 17% in 2022 to 52% in 2025. Arab Barometer's Iraq survey, fielded between late September and early November 2025 and therefore a genuinely post-war observation, records favourable views of Iran rising from 34% to 44%, with positive assessments of Khamenei's regional policy rising from 37% to 48%. The war likely accelerated this shift: with 87% of Iraqis holding unfavourable views of Israel, the confrontation read as just to much of the Shia public, and Iran's survival of the war has been framed in Shia media as a form of victory. Figures post-February 2026 are not yet available, but the trajectory is unlikely to have reversed.
The Tishreen episode completes the picture, because it shows what genuine decline looks like when it happens. Between 2019 and 2021, mass protests produced a real legitimacy crisis: Fatah (coalition of Shia militias) fell from 48% in 2018 to 17 in 2021, and protest-aligned candidates entered parliament in numbers. That was a measurable, structural setback. By 2025 the Tishreen vote had collapsed entirely, its figures exposed as weak, divided and unable to deliver, while the militia-linked seat count reached its historical peak. The one documented episode of Iranian decline in Iraq has been reversed on every indicator that registered it.
The decline narrative measures the wrong variable. Visible militia activity has fallen because Iraq's value to Iran under wartime sanctions and a Hormuz blockade depends on Iraq staying solvent, unsanctioned and connected, and because Iranian statecraft defaults to concealment under pressure. Every structural indicator, from a record parliamentary position to a documented recovery in Shia public opinion to the collapse of the only movement that ever genuinely eroded Iran's standing, shows an influence that is more consolidated, more institutionally embedded and more socially anchored than at any point since the ISIS era.
Turkish bases are thinning Kurdistan's border woodland, satellite data show, but far less than claimed
Videos of trucks carrying timber to Turkish military bases have sparked a major controversy in Iraq's Kurdistan Region in recent days, over whether Turkey is systematically cutting the region's border forests.
The issue has gone viral across Kurdish media. Rudaw, Kurdistan24 and opposition outlets each offer a different version of events, each fitting its own agenda.
To test the claims independently, The National Context analysed 25 years of satellite imagery covering every district of the Kurdistan Region. Satellite data is the most independent way to check what is happening on the ground. Here is what the findings show:
Woodland in areas of Turkish military activity, especially Amedi district in Duhok province, is being lost at about twice the rate of comparable woodland elsewhere. The loss is modest in scale, however, and concentrated where Turkey has built networks of new roads and outposts, including cleared hilltops consistent with helicopter landing sites.
Each year's loss is small. But it recurs every year and falls on the region's highest oak woodland, so the cumulative damage is significant enough to cause concern.
The long-term record shows no collapse of the region's forests. It does show a slow decline in the border belt relative to the rest of the region. The border belt is defined here as the woodland within 25 km of Turkey in Amedi, Zakho and Mergasur - all mapped. That pattern points to loss in specific patches.
Sentinel-2 satellite imagery shows where those patches are. Between 2017/18 and 2024/25, 5.6% of Amedi's woodland showed a marked drop in greenness, the highest share of any district. Zakho followed at 4.8% and Mergasur at 3.8%. Elsewhere the share was 2.8% in Akre, 2.5% in Soran, 2.1% in Penjwen on the Iranian border, 2.0% in Duhok and 1.7% in Pshdar, also on the Iranian border.
Several indicators contradict the opposition's allegation that the cutting is systematic and commercial, feeding furniture production inside Turkey:
Commercial logging usually spreads across any forest that trucks can reach. The border belt doesn't fit that pattern. If you split its woodland into 1 km squares, nearly 90% of the loss is packed into just one in ten squares, and about four in five squares show no loss at all.
Moreover, the loss follows the newly built roads. In the Metina mountains, a main target of Turkey's 2021 operation, 29% of woodland within 250 m of a new road showed a marked drop, against about 10% further away. The losses came in 2023 and 2024, the years a switchback road and then a ridge-crest road were built.
More importantly, the scale is limited. Across the border belt, about 36 km² of roughly 1,300 km² of woodland has shown a marked drop since 2017. About 20 km² of that is more than comparable woodland lost elsewhere, and 12 km² of the extra loss is in Amedi. That is 0.34% to 0.5% of the belt's woodland a year. By comparison, woodland in the region without Turkish military activity loses about 0.2% a year, Iran's Zagros oak forests about 0.16%, and forests worldwide about 0.25% - that is gross loss.
Also for context, other war zones have suffered far heavier losses. Syria's coastal forests lost 24% of their cover between 2010 and 2020, and western Syria 19% between 2010 and 2019. More than half of Afrin's forest cover was reported lost within about three years of Turkey's takeover. On Ukraine's front lines, 5% to 16% of forest was damaged in a single season.
The figures also strongly contradict any timber trade. Assume every affected hectare were dense, mature woodland at the top of published estimates, about 76 tonnes per hectare. The extra loss would then yield at most about 20,000 tonnes of wood a year, and all of the marked drop about 35,000 tonnes. Real yields are likely far lower. Moreover, most of this woodland is scrub oak, cut back repeatedly over generations. It is firewood grade and of little use to furniture makers.
Even the theoretical maximum would be about a 0.1% of Turkey's annual industrial wood harvest. Small-scale sales, such as surplus firewood sold in Sirnak or Hakkari or the felling of individual walnut and plane trees, cannot be ruled out, but a trade on the scale alleged can.
The full analysis, with the methodology and detailed results: thenationalcontext.com/turki…
As US Troops Leave Iraq, America's Security Model in the Middle East Is Unravelling
The US-led coalition's military mission in Iraq formally ended on Wednesday, 30 September. The withdrawal comes as the rest of the US network in the region has sustained damage on a scale it has never faced before. Since the United States and Israel began striking Iran on 28 February, Iranian missiles and drones have damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan, according to the Pentagon's inspector general. Iran focused its fire on the systems that allow the bases to see and defend themselves.
As a regional guarantee, the American security model in the Middle East is effectively over and highly unlikely to return in its old form. The Economist reached a similar conclusion last week, arguing that decades of American hegemony over the region are coming to an end.
If the American guarantee is ending, the question is who shapes what comes next. The Economist expects the post-American region to be shaped by three non-Arab powers: Turkey, Iran and Israel.
Yet the three differ in important ways that offer clues to what the next stage might look like: thenationalcontext.com/as-us…
On Kurdish urban settlement in Iraq and Syria:
As we have noted before, demographics are one of the key differences between Iraqi and Syrian Kurds and a main reason their models have diverged so sharply.
Urban settlements are one of the clearest examples. Cities shape how wars are fought, drive intellectual production and productivity, and form the foundation of any viable entity.
Syria has only three Kurdish-linked cities with populations over 100,000, and two of them are highly mixed despite their large Kurdish populations. Afrin is the only solidly Kurdish city of that size, while Qamishli and Hasakah are mixed.
Iraq, by contrast, has at least nine solidly Kurdish-majority cities over 100,000, plus two mixed ones.
The gap widens further down the scale. Extending the count to towns of 50,000 to 100,000 adds only six in Syria, while Iraq has more than 26 towns over 50,000, most of them solidly Kurdish.
As we argued in a previous piece, this helps explain why the governing models in Syria and Iraq have diverged so clearly, and not only with regard to the Kurds: thenationalcontext.com/why-s…
Even the Syrian towns we have classed as Kurdish-majority sit within mixed surroundings. In Derik (al-Malikiyah) and Girkê Legê (al-Muabbada), Kurds likely make up over 70 percent of the population, yet both towns have a sizeable Arab presence, particularly in the surrounding countryside. This pattern holds across most Kurdish-majority areas in Syria. In Iraq, the Kurdish areas are too demographically consolidated for a Syrian-style model to apply.
Urban settlements matter on several levels. Economically, they underpin the viability of any region. Intellectually, larger cities generate more output and perhaps a population more ready to sustain a polity. Militarily, alongside topography, they make war far more difficult and costly, so the larger the cities, the weaker a central government's incentive to launch a military campaign.
This is one reason such a campaign is much harder to contemplate in Iraq. In Syria, the SDF-led administration sought to hold on to Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor partly because it needed a larger population and greater geographic depth to be viable as a region. Once those areas were lost and it was pushed back to a small pocket in Hasakah province, its viability fell sharply, especially as the province's two largest cities, Hasakah and Qamishli, are highly mixed and unlikely to be dominated by any single group.
Kurdish-majority and mixed cities of over 100,000 in Iraq and Syria: thenationalcontext.com/porta…
More on how demographics doomed a Kurdish national project in Syria:
thenationalcontext.com/the-d…
As the U.S. exit from Iraq concluded, the 30 September deadline for integrating Iraq's Shia militias into the security forces slipped, and a new roadmap has taken its place.
The deadline was initially had been presented as firm. In August the State Administration Coalition, the governing alliance of Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties, warned that armed activity outside official institutions after 30 September could be dealt with under the anti-terrorism law.
The retreat began in the second half of August and coincided with the visit of Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran's parliament, who arrived in Baghdad on 19 August for three days. According to Iraqi reporting based on three sources, he urged leaders of the Coordination Framework, the ruling alliance of Shia parties, to leave the weapons with the factions or deposit them with the PMF, where they would remain available in an emergency. He accepted exclusive state control in principle while arguing that current conditions did not allow it.
On 21 August, while Ghalibaf was still in Baghdad, the prime minister's spokesman, Haidar al-Aboudi, was quoted saying that 30 September concerned the American withdrawal and was not the final date for faction weapons. The next day Deputy Speaker Adnan Fayhan said the weapons would be stored in PMF warehouses, and on 23 August National Security Adviser Qasim al-Araji described weapons control as a gradual process beginning after the coalition left. Reports at the time described a proposal under which factions would declare their weapons and premises to the government and freeze their activity for two years in place of a handover.
The language shifted with it. On 9 September, Ali al-Asadi, political chief of Harakat al-Nujaba, said the understanding with Framework negotiators had moved from confining weapons to the state to regulating them, and described 30 September as the start of talks that could last months.
The clearest outline of the new roadmap was set out on 22 September by Haidar al-Fouadi, political chief of former prime minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani's coalition. It has five stages: announce the agreement alongside the withdrawal; hold a 90-day period in which the factions stop attacks, with assurances against U.S. strikes on them; begin a gradual weapons handover; end the factions' independent armed existence, admitting their members as individuals into the PMF and other official bodies; and complete the process by 30 June 2027, after which independent armed groups would be unlawful. Fouadi described this as the basis for a future agreement, with negotiations continuing.
Beyond that outline, the mechanics remain contested. One account describes a new PMF directorate receiving weapons under government supervision from January 2027, with protection from prosecution and access to electoral politics for factions that commit to ending independent armed activity. Another places the handover of strategic weapons, meaning ballistic missiles, rockets and one-way attack drones, from March 2027, with faction brigades entering the PMF as units. The difference matters: admitting members as individuals would break faction command structures, while admitting brigades would carry those structures into the PMF intact.
The PMF route allows the language of state control to be met at little cost to the factions. The storage compromise reported in August described depots registered with the government and open to surprise inspections, but managed in practice jointly by the factions and the PMF, whose chief of staff, Abu Fadak al-Mohammadawi, comes from Kataib Hezbollah. Moving weapons into PMF warehouses can therefore change their legal custodian while leaving practical control with the same networks.
The PMF legislation adds a further layer. On 29 September, the cabinet approved a PMF bill for referral to parliament, reviving legislation Washington had opposed. Reported revisions removed a PMF staff college and the Muhandis General Company, the PMF's commercial arm, from the draft, which suggests the text was adjusted under American pressure. Negotiators are also reported to be close to giving the PMF chairman the rank of a minister without portfolio, and a separate Framework proposal would create a dedicated PMF drone formation to receive faction weapons. If passed without breaking faction command, these measures would give the factions' capabilities official status, funding and legal cover.
More: thenationalcontext.com/iraqs…
Iraq’s Armed Factions Win the U.S. Withdrawal and Keep Their Weapons for Now
The end of the U.S. presence in Iraq today is a major symbolic victory for Iraq's Shia militias, which have spent months on the defensive during the Iran war.
The withdrawal traces back to January 2020. Days after the U.S. killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran's Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of the PMF, Iraq's parliament voted to expel U.S. forces.
The vote was carried overwhelmingly by Shia MPs. Most Kurdish and Sunni MPs boycotted the session.
The negotiations that followed produced the September 2024 agreement setting out the U.S. withdrawal, which was completed today.
For months, 30 September was also presented as the deadline for resolving the future of the Shia armed groups and their weapons.
That deadline has now passed. Negotiations over the militias' future have been pushed to 30 June 2027, almost a year away, with Washington's agreement.
Beyond the extra time, the meaning of "disarmament" keeps getting softer. The talk has moved from dismantling the groups to regulating, reorganising and integrating them, mainly into the PMF.
The factions have secured the U.S. exit and kept their weapons for now. What happens after June 2027 remains open. More: thenationalcontext.com/iraqs…
As US Troops Leave Iraq, America's Security Model in the Middle East Is Unravelling
The US-led coalition's military mission in Iraq formally ends on Wednesday, 30 September, and Iraqi officials said on Monday that the last US combat and logistics personnel had already left. For the first time since the war against ISIS began in 2014, the US has no bases in either Iraq or Syria. More importantly, the exit coincides with a set of conditions that together make this moment unprecedented.
The withdrawal comes as the network of bases, sensors and air defences that sustains the entire US mission in the Middle East has suffered damage on a scale and breadth it has never faced before.
Since the US and Israel began striking Iran on 28 February, Iran has systematically hit hundreds of buildings along with key radar, satellite terminals and early-warning assets. These strikes have partially blinded US bases and put some of them out of action, while sustained interceptions have drained the missile stocks that protect them. Independent estimates put the US Patriot interceptor inventory at about 800 at the end of July, down from roughly 2,330 before the war, and THAAD at about 250, down from 452.
This combination has no precedent since 1945. American bases were attacked in Korea and Vietnam, but only inside the country at war, and the regional rear that supplied the fighting stayed intact.
The Korea and Vietnam comparisons that are often invoked in fact show how different this moment is. In neither war did the US see its entire regional security architecture come under systematic attack, or its air defence stocks drawn down to this degree.
Other metrics show how much the industrial base that sustained those wars has shrunk. US industrial production was 45% of global output during the Korean War and 35% during the Vietnam War, against just 15% in 2024. Its share of global crude steel production, a key proxy for the capacity to build ships, vehicles and munitions, was 46% during the Korean War and 26% during the Vietnam War, against just 4.4% in 2025. Its share of global electricity production, a measure of the energy base that underpins wartime production, was 35% in 1950 and 31% during the Vietnam War, against just 14% in 2025. And US GDP on a PPP basis, a broad measure of the resources a state can mobilise, was 27.3% of the global total in 1950 and 22% during the Vietnam War, against 14.6% in 2025.
The weight of these trends, together with the US exit and the strain on its entire regional military architecture, has led The Economist to call the moment unprecedented in the last century and to argue that decades of American hegemony over the region are about to end.
If the American security guarantee is ending, the question is who shapes what follows. The Economist expects the post-American region to be shaped by three non-Arab powers: Turkey, Iran and Israel.
The Iran war, however, has shown that strategic depth, the ability to produce weapons at scale and an indigenous defence industry have mattered more than many expected. Israel has little geographic depth of its own and has long compensated through the US, relying on American basing, early warning, air defence and resupply. As that model unravels, Israel stands to lose more than either Turkey or Iran. Both have far greater geographic depth and larger capacity to mass-produce cheap weapons, though Iran's industrial base has been under sustained attack since February and Turkey still depends on imported engines and key components. Israel is likely to retain its qualitative edge for years to come and to remain the region's leading strike and intelligence power, one Washington calls a "model ally". That edge may count for less in an era of cheap drones produced at a scale that can overwhelm advanced but expensive systems. Israel has shown it can innovate and adapt, but so have Iran and Turkey, and in a contest of volume the side with depth and mass holds the advantage.
As this analysis explores, the likely result is a layered and more crowded order: thenationalcontext.com/as-us…
On 21 September, the KRG held a ceremony in Erbil to mark the completion of the decades-long effort to unify its Peshmerga forces, 11 days after the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs announced that the process had concluded.
Under the new structure, the 80 Forces of the KDP and the 70 Forces of the PUK formally cease to exist. Their personnel now sit in two Regional Commands under the ministry, organised into 11 divisions, two Support Forces Commands and a separate commando formation.
Regional Command 1 is led by Lieutenant General Najat Ali Salih, former commander of the KDP's 80 Forces. Regional Command 2 is led by Lieutenant General Omar Salih Hassan, former commander of the PUK's 70 Forces. Each party chose its own commander, and Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani formalised both appointments by decree. The two commands have also kept the insignia of the forces they replaced. Each emblem retains its party-era design, with the old force name replaced by "Regional Command 1" or "Regional Command 2". Neither command has been given a new institutional identity.
The divisions are split along the same line. Regional Command 1 holds the six odd-numbered divisions (1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11), all drawn from the 80 Forces, while Regional Command 2 holds the five even-numbered divisions (2, 4, 6, 8 and 10), drawn from the 70 Forces. On paper, the combined force totals 37 brigades and more than 100 battalions.
Heavy weapons are divided in the same way. Much of the Peshmerga's artillery, armour, air defence and combat engineering capacity sits in two Support Forces Commands that stand apart from the divisions. The 1st Support Forces Command comes from the KDP and the 2nd from the PUK, and each is aligned with its party's Regional Command. The PUK side also retains its commando forces as a separate formation outside the 11 numbered divisions, in effect a special division. As a result, infantry, heavy weapons and special forces are all organised along the line that divided the two party armies before the reform.
For more detail, see the interactive map of the two Regional Commands below: thenationalcontext.com/peshm…
Israel faces a strategic paradox in Syria: the more it escalates to constrain Turkish military influence, the more important Turkey becomes to Damascus. Here is why.
Walla, an Israeli news site with close ties to the security establishment, quoted an Israeli security official this month: "Moderate Sunni states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are working around the clock to draw Sharaa closer to them...Al-Sharaa will not be so quick to hand territory over to Erdogan, nor will he necessarily allow him to take control of military bases in Syria. Therefore, to some extent, the recent Israeli strike in Syria helped Ahmed al-Sharaa."
This misreads the position of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former rebel commander who now leads Syria.
Saudi Arabia is not on a par with Turkey in Syria. Al-Sharaa's central ambition is a strong army, and among the regional powers Damascus can work with, only Turkey has the industrial breadth and military capacity to help build one. Saudi Arabia can bring money and political backing, but its struggle to contain the Houthis in Yemen shows how far it is from matching Turkey's influence and reach.
Israel judges Turkish influence largely by bases and troops on the ground. Ankara is aiming for something more lasting: to become the ecosystem the Syrian army operates within. That starts with officer education and training, which are already under way, and extends to the systems the new army is built around, from software and radars to the architecture linking its forces, followed by ammunition, sustainment and refurbishment. Each layer turns a single sale into a continuing relationship.
Israel's objection goes beyond Turkey. It wants Syria too weak to challenge its uncontested advantage in the air and on the ground, and after Bashar al-Assad fell in December 2024, the Israeli military said its strikes had destroyed up to 80 per cent of the Syrian army's capabilities. Al-Sharaa wants the opposite: a unified state with an army strong enough to make Syria a regional power. Turkey shares that goal for its own reasons. It has a border of roughly 900 kilometres with Syria, it wants a strong neighbour as a buffer against Israel, and it wants a central government able to prevent the Kurdish national project in the north-east from reviving. On Syria's recovery, Damascus and Ankara are on the same side.
Three trends are converging to make Turkey Syria's most practical partner. The first is global rearmament. Only a handful of countries can equip an army across every service, and most are out of reach. Russia's output is absorbed by the war in Ukraine. China is Washington's main rival while Syria is trying to rebuild relations with the West. The United States keeps its arms embargo on Syria and has warned even close allies of delivery delays of up to five years as the Iran war drains its stocks. Europe is rearming for itself, and South Korea's order books are full for years.
The second is Turkey's industrial maturity. Its defence industry now produces most of what Syria would need from rifles and armoured vehicles to drones, radars, air defence, tanks and warships, which is what makes the ecosystem model possible. Syria would be its largest test, and Turkey could come to hold the place in the Syrian military that the Soviet Union once did.
The third is Washington's posture. The United States withdrew its last troops from Syria in April. With rivalries with China and Russia and a war with Iran to manage, it has little appetite for a confrontation with a NATO ally over Syria's army. Washington's latest national security and defence strategies explicitly call for burden-sharing by regional partners, and the security strategy names Turkey among the countries whose support could help stabilise Syria.
The relationship is already visible. Syrian cadets are studying at Turkish military academies, and Syrian units joined Turkey's EFES-2026 exercise in May, their first abroad. BMC Amazon and Otokar Cobra armoured vehicles appear regularly with Syrian defence and interior ministry forces, alongside rifles from Turkish makers such as Sarsilmaz and Kalekalip. No other country is known to have openly supplied significant new equipment since December 2024, apart from possible Russian spare parts for the Soviet-era arsenal.
Tension between Damascus and Ankara remains. Al-Sharaa wants autonomy and has cultivated Saudi Arabia, other Gulf states and Russia to avoid depending on any one patron, which is the instinct the Israeli official is counting on. But Israeli pressure is forcing him to recalibrate. Both governments are Sunni-led with broadly shared regional aspirations, and al-Sharaa knows Syria cannot replace Turkey as the larger power. What Syria can realistically aim for is an important place within a Turkish-centred security system.
The likely result is a cycle. Each Israeli strike reduces Syria's alternatives and strengthens the case for relying on Turkey, and each step towards closer cooperation gives Israel a reason to strike again. Damascus and Ankara may respond by making their cooperation less visible, relying on training, software and supply chains that are harder to target than bases. Israel's pressure would then, ironically, leave Turkish influence more deeply embedded and longer-lasting. The rivalry is therefore likely to intensify, and Turkey's position in Syria is likely to grow with it.
More details:
thenationalcontext.com/syria…
Peshmerga Unification Codifies the KDP-PUK Military Divide
The Kurdistan Region formally declared the decades-long unification of its Peshmerga forces complete on Monday.
The resulting military, however, has an extraordinarily unusual structure, with an arrangement that has no clear parallel in any other army in the world, and it may make a single Kurdish army harder to build.
Under the new structure, the 80 Forces of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the 70 Forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) formally cease to exist. Their personnel now sit in two Regional Commands under the ministry, organised into 11 divisions, two support forces commands and a separate commando formation that acts as PUK's sixth division.
The new military structure keeps the KDP and PUK hierarchies largely intact, gives each sweeping control over appointments and spending, and makes a single army for the region harder to build. The new structure is unique in the world in giving a regional command authorities so broad that it can even appoint its own division commanders and other key officers, as well as having its own broader budget sub-account and more.
That distinction matters because a “single line of accounting” was one of the central benchmarks of the American-backed reform process. The 2022 US-KRG memorandum required the partisan military structures to be absorbed under MoPA by September 2026, while American financial support was designed to decline over the four-year period. The public ceremony came on September 21, exactly four years after the 2022 memorandum was renewed and nine days before the international coalition’s remaining military mission in Iraq is scheduled to end on September 30.
The political timing also extends beyond the coalition deadline. Baghdad is simultaneously pursuing a much larger campaign to bring weapons held by armed factions under state authority, and several Iraqi factions have specifically demanded that the Peshmerga be included in any law applying that principle to armed organisations. Iraq’s president has rejected that equivalence, arguing that the Peshmerga is a constitutionally recognised force and therefore falls outside the militia-disarmament process.
More details of the new Peshmerga structure and the KDP-PUK divide: thenationalcontext.com/peshm…
How Syria Could Become Turkey’s Biggest Defence Experiment
Israel’s fixation on Turkey’s physical military presence in Syria may be missing Ankara’s more consequential objective: to become the principal architecture of the new Syrian military ecosystem.
Turkey increasingly presents itself as a “defence ecosystem” rather than simply a supplier of weapons, offering everything from design and manufacturing to subsystems, software, ammunition, maintenance and sustainment.
Elements of this model are already visible elsewhere. In Somalia, Turkey has spent years training national forces and has committed under a ten-year agreement to build, train and equip the Somali navy. In Azerbaijan, years of Turkish training and joint exercises have produced unusually deep interoperability across land and air forces.
Syria would be a much larger test. It has a larger population and historically maintained substantial land forces, air defence, aviation and naval capabilities, much of which now has to be rebuilt simultaneously. If Turkey becomes central to that process across multiple services and technologies, Syria could become the first major test of Ankara’s transition from arms exporter to exporter of military ecosystems.
That creates a central tension. Al-Sharaa wants to build an independent Syrian power centre while limiting the leverage of any foreign patron. Turkey, meanwhile, wants to expand its regional influence and increasingly presents its defence industry as an integrated system that can be exported abroad.
Yet the international arms market leaves Syria with fewer realistic alternatives than it would have had a decade ago. The two ambitions may therefore be more compatible than they initially appear. Syria needs an anchor for rebuilding military power while preserving political autonomy. Turkey needs a state large and important enough to demonstrate that its defence model can extend beyond individual weapons sales and limited partnerships. Syria may provide both.
thenationalcontext.com/syria…
Iranian Kurdish Armed Attacks Decline After May–July Surge, with Pro-PKK Groups Dominating Activity
Attacks by Iranian Kurdish groups inside Iran have declined after a sudden increase that ran from late May, following the Iran war ceasefire, through July. Several attacks were recorded in August and September, but they have been considerably less lethal, with the pattern shifting away from larger armed clashes towards smaller, more targeted attacks.
More importantly, of around 27 recorded incidents, pro-PKK/PJAK-linked Iranian Kurdish groups account for at least 63%, compared with just 11% attributed to other Kurdish groups, while around 26% remain disputed or unresolved. Among incidents where the perpetrator can be identified, pro-PKK/PJAK-linked groups account for around 85%.
Their dominance of the armed campaign is therefore clear. The trajectory since July, however, points towards declining intensity and changing tactics: fewer multi-fatality confrontations, more targeted killings, and, particularly in September, a growing share of incidents in which the perpetrator cannot be identified.
The full interactive map here: thenationalcontext.com/porta…
Two things are worth noting. First, the attacks have declined since late July as Iran restarted serious diplomatic talks with Iraq and the KRG aimed at having the Iranian Kurdish groups expelled from the Kurdistan Region entirely, to a third, non-neighbouring country, as we have reported here: thenationalcontext.com/why-w…
Second, PJAK's dominance comes amid the peace process, as it has expanded its presence along the Sulaimani area's borders with Iran and much of the armed activity has concentrated on this geography. More on PJAK's expanded presence: thenationalcontext.com/pkk-i…
What Syria, Iraq and Turkey reveal about the scale of the global energy shock
• Syria saw its biggest protests since the fall of Assad this week, driven by the rapid rise in energy prices and its direct effect on daily life. The sequence is a useful illustration of how the crisis works: fuel prices rise, freight costs follow, bread and transport become more expensive, basic services and inflation come under pressure, and people take to the streets.
• Since the Iran war began on 28 February, diesel has more than doubled in Syria and 95-octane petrol has risen by around 86%.
• The same week in Iraq, farmers and factory owners in the southern city of Muthanna took tractors, combine harvesters and heavy equipment onto the roads in protest after diesel for their sectors rose from 400 to 1,250 dinars per litre.
• Even in Turkey, a much larger economy with deeper state capacity, petrol rose from 57.19 to 80.31 lira per litre between 24 February and 17 September, an increase of 40%, alongside a 66% rise in diesel, despite active state intervention to soften the increases.
• The comparison matters because these three are the advantaged cases. They are neighbours, they hold their own oil or sit close to the source, and the crisis has reached daily life in all of them anyway. For countries with neither of those advantages, the disruption will be deeper as seen in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
• There is little modern precedent for this combination.
The full analysis:
thenationalcontext.com/what-…
