Not the Same Force: The Peshmerga, the PMF, and the Disarmament Question

A debate arrives at a fragile moment

A renewed worry is moving through Kurdish political circles over the role and status of the Kurdistan Region's Peshmerga forces. The anxiety is not abstract. It is tied directly to the current push to bring the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and other armed groups under the full and exclusive control of the Iraqi state, an effort that gained urgency after the United States openly called for the disarmament of Iran aligned militias.

The central concern is one of contagion. The idea now circulating in Baghdad is to centralize all armed actors under state authority, and part of that conversation includes proposals to create a dedicated ministry or body to manage these forces. The fear among many in Erbil is that a framework designed to absorb or dismantle militias could be stretched, deliberately or carelessly, to include the Peshmerga.

The timing makes the issue more sensitive. More than eighteen months after the October 2024 parliamentary elections, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) still has not formed a new cabinet. The two dominant parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), remain divided over sovereign posts, with the interior ministry a particular sticking point. A region negotiating with itself is a region with less leverage in Baghdad, and that weakness shapes how seriously the disarmament talk is taken.

An old fault line: Units 70 and 80

The vulnerability is not only external. The Peshmerga remain incompletely unified. The two largest legacy formations, Unit 70 affiliated with the PUK and Unit 80 affiliated with the KDP, have for years sat only partly under the authority of the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs. Their primary loyalty has historically run to the parties rather than to a single national command.

This is the same structural problem that turned violent during the Kurdish civil war of 1994 to 1997, when the KDP and the PUK fought each other using their separate Peshmerga forces. That memory still informs how outside partners, and many Kurds, view the cost of a divided armed force.

There has been real movement. The KRG has folded brigades into organized divisions, and in November 2025 it reactivated Unit 80 under a new structure described as Area Command 1. In February 2026, Prime Minister Masrour Barzani issued an executive order defining the administrative, legal, and financial authority of regional corps and division commands, a step meant to pull these forces into a single chain of command. Salaries are being shifted onto a centralized payment system to improve transparency. The direction is unification, but the destination has not yet been reached.

Decades of investment, limited returns

For years, Western partners have tried to do what the parties could not do alone: turn the Peshmerga into one professional institution. The United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and others have invested heavily in training, equipment, and salaries, all aimed at unifying the force under one command, making it the guarantor of the Region's security, and positioning it to protect minorities inside and along the Region's borders. A 2022 memorandum of understanding between Washington and the KRG set 2026 as the target for full unification.

The results have been partial at best. As one analysis of the reform process recently put it, the effort advanced largely because external partners wanted it to advance, not because it was driven from within. That dependence is now the heart of the problem. American forces are scheduled to leave the Erbil airbase and remaining installations by the end of 2026. If foreign funding and pressure recede, the reform program could stall, leaving the parties themselves responsible for finishing a job they have repeatedly left undone.

Into this picture comes the broader regional shift. The campaign launched by the United States and Israel against Iran in February 2026, and the wave of PMF and Iranian missile and drone strikes that followed against the Kurdistan Region, hardened Washington's stance toward the militias. American calls for centralizing armed power and disarming the PMF are read by some in the Region as a possible prelude to pressure on the Peshmerga as well. The logic is guilt by category: if the goal is one state monopoly on arms, where do the Region's forces fit?

Why the comparison breaks down

This is where Kurdish leaders have drawn a firm line, and where the analysis matters most. The Peshmerga and the PMF are not the same kind of entity, and treating them as interchangeable misreads both the law and the facts.

The PMF emerged from a coalition of mostly Shia volunteer groups and was formally folded into the Iraqi state in 2018, nominally under the prime minister as commander in chief. Yet years of reporting and analysis have shown that several factions answer to their own leaders and to external patrons rather than to the national chain of command. A militia, by definition, is a less institutionalized armed group, often tied to a person or a movement and operating partly outside formal state structures.

The Peshmerga occupy a different legal and institutional space. Even with their internal divisions and party loyalties, they sit inside a recognized governmental institution, the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs, within the constitutionally established Kurdistan Region. They are not a private army standing outside the state. They are a regional force whose existence the Iraqi constitution itself anticipates. This is the distinction Kurdish officials have stressed repeatedly: the problem the disarmament drive is meant to solve, armed groups acting beyond state control, is not the situation of the Peshmerga.

Masoud Barzani, the KDP leader and former president of the Region, has long anchored the Kurdish argument in the constitution rather than in slogans. The Peshmerga's standing, in his framing, is a matter of national agreement and sacrifice, not a favor to be withdrawn. Recalling the war against the Islamic State, Barzani said the Peshmerga "suffered 12,000 martyrs and injuries in the battle against ISIS," a reminder that the force defended communities across Iraq, not only Kurds. He has also tied the country's instability to a failure of governance, arguing that "one of Iraq's biggest problems is not implementing the constitution."

In a statement on March 16, 2026, as attacks on the Region intensified, Barzani urged the federal government and the KRG to settle their disputes through dialogue and to "prevent opportunistic actors from exploiting the situation and deepening the crises and conflicts." The warning was pointed. A moment of regional war and a leaderless KRG is exactly the kind of opening in which a force could be redefined out of existence by political maneuver rather than by law.

The constitutional ground

The Peshmerga are the principal protection force of the Kurdistan Region, and their legal basis rests on Article 121 of the Iraqi constitution. The article does not name the Peshmerga directly, but its fifth clause makes regional government responsible for "the establishment and organization of the internal security forces for the region such as police, security forces, and guards of the region." On that basis, the Peshmerga are officially recognized as the Guards of the Region, a status acknowledged in Iraqi law, in the Region's own laws, and by international partners.

The practical effect is significant. Because Article 121 places internal security in the hands of the Region, the federal definition of the Iraqi Security Forces does not extend to the Peshmerga. They are an official component of Iraq's overall defense architecture, yet they answer to Erbil rather than to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. Kurdish leaders have used this same clause to press Baghdad to formally recognize the Peshmerga's constitutional status and to equalize their salaries with those of the Iraqi army.

One common claim deserves a careful note. The constitution does not contain an explicit article forbidding Iraqi federal forces from entering the Kurdistan Region. The protection is indirect. Article 121 grants the Region authority over its own internal security, and the KRG's consistent position is that any federal deployment inside the Region requires agreement and coordination. The events of 2017, when federal forces and PMF units moved into Kirkuk and other disputed areas after the independence referendum, show that this protection is political and contested in practice, not an automatic legal shield. That is precisely why the current debate matters: the Peshmerga's standing is strong on paper, but it is only as durable as the political will to honor it.

The bottom line

The disarmament conversation is real, and the regional climate makes it easy for the Peshmerga to be swept rhetorically into a discussion that was never about them. The substance, however, points the other way. Militias operating beyond state control and a constitutionally grounded regional force housed within a government ministry are different problems requiring different answers. The risk for the Kurdistan Region is not that the law is unclear. The risk is that a divided leadership, a fading external guarantee, and a turbulent moment combine to let a settled constitutional question be reopened by those who would prefer it stayed unsettled.