The Security Apparatus of Northern Iraq: One Thousand and One Kurdish Leaders and the Allure of the East

The Northern Part of Iraq and its structures has generated considerable interest in the West in the last thirty years. This paper analyzes the creation of the security structures in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), highlighting the difficulties effected by their traditional disunity within the context of the historical periods that this article considers – the period from 1991 to 2003, 2003 to 2014, 2014 to 2017 and finally, 2017 to 2020. As for the last of the stages, this article claims that a US´s withdrawal from Iraq might change the strategy followed by the Iraqi Kurds whose identity and political structures are at stake.