Recent events suggest that Barzani will have no change of heart or mind in his final years. He still lives in an old resort, which first Saddam and then Masoud confiscated for their own personal use. First his children and then his grandchildren were educated in a school reserved only for family members so that they need not mix with ordinary Kurds. Here, Barzani is far more extreme than Arab monarchs who encouraged their children to mix with ordinary citizens in order to allow them to develop friendship and lifelong ties to the people whose acceptance was the key to legitimacy. Bizarrely, as Kurdish society grows, Barzani does not seem able to conceive the importance of broader ties and friendships beyond narrow patronage networks.
Simply put, Barzani has no friends whom he does not pay.
Indeed, Barzani’s willingness to serve foreign clients may be the defining point of his legacy. After Turkish airstrikes on Jan. 23, 2019, left four locals dead, protesters in the town of Shiladize overran an illegal Turkish army outpost located inside Iraqi Kurdistan and burned military vehicles and equipment. Turkish soldiers opened fire on protesters, killing one and wounding eight.
In response to the incident, Barzani closed NRT TV, the main independent station, in Duhok and arrested its journalists. Nechirvan Barzani, Masoud’s nephew and the prime minister, did not condemn not the Turks for airstrikes which killed Iraqi Kurdish civilians, or for firing on Iraqi Kurdish protesters. Instead, he condemned the media for reporting news which might “deteriorate the security of the Kurdistan Region."
Nechirvan explained, “Democracy and freedom have their boundaries. For us, the security of people is much more important than things are being discussed,” he said, in defense of the Barzani clan’s repression of the free press. There followed mass arrests carried out not by police but rather the intelligence service Masoud’s son runs, as activists and journalists organized a protest in solidarity with the Shiladze victims. Masoud and Masrour based their crackdown under Iraqi Penal Law No. 156, which Saddam used to justify many of his arbitrary arrests.
Masoud Barzani, his nephew, and his sons often take umbrage when compared to Saddam or sons Uday and Qusay, but they continue to provide fodder for comparison. Most of those whom the Barzanis arrested in subsequent crackdowns had no connection to the attack on the illegal Turkish base, but rather were protesting the Barzani response to those protesting the Turkish affront to Kurdish nationalism. Barzani’s intolerance to the subsequent protests both underscored his vulnerability to the nationalist issue and also the reality that he has effectively become a client to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Barzani’s followers and the media he sponsors often depict his support for the September 2017 Kurdish referendum as proof of his national credentials, and they describe the subsequent conflict with Iraqi forces and Iranian-backed militias as proof that Barzani is a nationalist leader like his father. In reality, however, the referendum was cynical. Its timing was meant to prolong his rule extra-constitutionally and to provide sovereign immunity to international debt collection after losing a series of arbitration rulings. Barzani’s embrace of Turkish forces on Iraqi and Iraqi Kurdish territory shows his exaggerated complaints about Iraqi and Iranian actions to be hypocritical.
Iraqi Kurdistan may spend millions in public relations in Washington and London, but sometimes money and lobbying firms cannot supplant reality. As journalists languish in prison, debt booms, democracy disappears, and Barzani bows figuratively if not literally before Turkey and the contracts Erdoğan can provide, Barzani should recognize he will never share his father’s reputation or legacy.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
Reporter's code: 50101