When the news broke on August 22, 2025, that armed clashes had erupted inside Sulaymaniyah’s Lalezar Hotel between the forces of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan President Bafel Talabani and his cousin Lahur Sheikh Jangi, many in Kurdistan sighed, not in shock, but in recognition. This was not the beginning of a new cycle of violence. It was merely the latest chapter in a long history of the Iraqi Kurdish leaders resolving political disputes not through dialogue, law, or institutions—but through force of arms. The showdown at Lalezar was an outcome of seventy years of fratricide, purges, and thuggery carried out in the name of Kurdish nationalism. Consider the record:
When any dissident faction challenged policy, those in power would silence it.
Just over sixty years ago, in July 1964, Kurdistan Democratic Party founder Mulla Mustafa Barzani ordered an armed assault against the Political Bureau faction, a group of younger urban intellectuals like Jalal Talabani, who in 1975 would formalize the division when he created the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The site of the 1964 skirmish, Mawat, is a village in the mountains of Sulaymani province. What should have been a debate about party’s direction was settled with bullets. This set the precedent: When any dissident faction challenged policy, those in power would silence it. The Barzani tribe and the son and grandson of Mullah Mustafa have dominated the Kurdistan Democratic Party ever since.
In the summer of 1978, in what became known as the “catastrophe of Hakkari,” the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan moved its forces from Qandil mountains to the Bradost region near where the borders of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey meet. The Kurdistan Democratic Party responded with force, killing Patriotic Union of Kurdistan leaders and capturing several fighters. Once again, political disputes translated into armed clashes, leaving a trail of corpses instead of compromise.
The early 1980s saw the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan clashing not only with the Kurdistan Democratic Party but also with Kurdish communists massacring a number of them. In 1988, eight years into the Iran-Iraq War, Tehran forced the squabbling Iraqi Kurdish groups into Kurdistan Front, a shaky coalition held together by threats and force, which Iranian leaders hoped to use against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
[In the 1990s], full-blown civil war erupted between the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
The nadir of the intra-Kurdish struggle came in the 1990s. For the first time, they received overt international support. The no-fly zone that the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Turkey established to protect the Kurds, however, soon turned into a battleground among Kurdish political movements. In 1993, both Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan turned their guns against Abdullah Öcalan’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). That same year, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan began fighting Kurdish Islamists. The following year, full-blown civil war erupted between the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan as the Barzanis and Talabanis began squabbling over customs revenue and power. For four years, Kurdish groups targeted each other rather than fighting Saddam or developing the region. Kurds built prisons like Akre, modeled after Saddam’s Abu Ghraib. In 1996, Masoud Barzani even allied with Saddam to recapture Erbil after it fell into Talabani’s hands.
Then, in 1997, the Kurdistan Democratic Party fought the PKK alongside the Turkish army. In 2000, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan also fought the PKK.
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq to oust Saddam. U.S. policymakers promised to transform the country into a democracy. What resulted was a façade, at least in Iraqi Kurdistan. In December 2005, when the Kurdistan Islamic Union dared to contest democratic elections in Iraq independently, the Kurdistan Democratic Party attacked and killed its members in Duhok. Six years later, Barzani’s henchmen fired into a crowd of protestors in Sulaymani, killing one peaceful protestor and wounding more than fifty.
In 2015, when parliament attempted to amend the presidency law to enforce term limits, Barzani’s militiamen shut down parliament at gunpoint. Later, the Barzanis’ militia denied the speaker of parliament entry into Erbil, forcing parliament to shut down for two years. A building meant to represent democracy became a fortress sealed off from elected officials.
Multiple generations of Kurdish leaders could have built a garden, but instead they built a jungle, where only armed militias thrive.
While the Barzanis have intra-family feuds—first between Prime Minister Masrour Barzani and his cousin and regional president Nechirvan Barzani, and then among Masrour and his four younger brothers as he seeks to clear a path for his own son, Areen—this has not yet erupted into open conflict. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan was not so lucky. In 2021, a “white coup” ended the co-leadership of the Talabani cousins. Bafel Talabani consolidated power as he sidelined Lahur. But while Kurdish leaders are often down, they are seldom out. Bafel worried his cousin might still challenge him and, indeed, argued Lahur was plotting his assassination. The dispute culminated in the August 22, 2025, assault on Lahur’s residence, killing some of his men and arresting others.
Multiple generations of Kurdish leaders could have built a garden, but instead they built a jungle, where only armed militias thrive. They believe politics is survival of the fittest, that to lead one must command a militia, and that disputes can be resolved only through the barrel of a gun. But they ignore this jungle is of their own making.
Today Bafel is strong against Lahur. Tomorrow Lahur—or someone else—may rise against Bafel. The same danger exists in the Kurdistan Democratic Party: The question of succession after Masoud Barzani is not about institutions so much as about which gunman will sit in his throne in his isolated Sar-e Rash palace complex.
The lesson of Lalezar must not be vengeance, but a reckoning that Kurdish politics has failed to transcend violence and that Kurdish parties cannot safeguard even their own leaders and families without resorting to militias. Democracy is rhetorical window-dressing, not a belief either the Barzanis or Talabanis hold or even aspire toward. Unless Kurdish parties and society draw a red line against violence as a tool of political dispute, Lalezar will be just one more chapter; the jungle will claim its next victim soon enough.
