By: [Author Name] | History & Geopolitics Desk

The Kurds are not a monolith. The political fragmentation across four borders means that each Kurdish community has a different primary Jaani Dushman.

A painful truth in Kurdish discourse is that the most effective enemy has often been internal division. The classic Kurdish saying, “There are no friends beyond the mountains” (Heval tune li derê çiyan), reflects a deep-seated paranoia born from betrayal. But this paranoia is often turned inward.

The decades-long civil war between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in the 1990s—which killed thousands of Kurds—has led many to ask: Is nepotism and factionalism the real Jaani Dushman?

When the KDP invited the Turkish army into Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1990s to fight the PKK, or when the PUK aligned with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), many ordinary Kurds felt the Jaani Dushman was not an external state, but the failure of their own leadership. The corruption, the smuggling of oil, and the inability to unite for independence referendums (e.g., the 2017 Iraqi Kurdistan independence referendum, which failed due to lack of international support and internal incoherence) have led some intellectuals to argue that "Kurdish selfishness" is the true sworn enemy.