Kurdish leader Barzani pushes for leverage with Baghdad in Iraq vote

BAGHDAD Reuters) -Masoud Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdish leader who first took up arms against Saddam Hussein as a teenage guerrilla, remains a towering figure in Kurdish politics as Iraq heads into its November 11 election.

Though he no longer holds an official post, Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) is urging a strong Kurdish turnout to safeguard regional interests and strengthen its hand in fraught negotiations with Baghdad.

Barzani’s political journey has been shaped by decades of rebellion, betrayal, and uneasy truces with successive Iraqi governments. Now in his late 70s, he continues to wield influence behind the scenes, often referred to as "President” in Kurdish media and diplomatic circles.

His legacy looms large over the race for seats in the national parliament in Baghdad, a contest that could either reinforce Kurdish autonomy or expose deepening fractures within the Kurdish political landscape.

A strong KDP performance would give Barzani’s camp more leverage in disputes with the central government over oil revenues and budget allocations — issues that have sharply escalated tensions between Erbil and Baghdad in 2025.

A weak showing, however, could embolden rival Kurdish factions and strengthen the central government’s position.

FROM MOUNTAIN FIGHTER TO POLITICAL POWER BROKER

Barzani's long career has been marked by cunning and patience, qualities that helped the Kurds in northern Iraq to survive brutality under Saddam.

Following the 1991 Gulf war, the Kurds rose up against Saddam's dictatorship, and Barzani and his peshmerga fighters came down from the mountains and captured several cities.

But the victorious U.S.-led allies balked at the prospect of a Kurdish split from Baghdad and initially gave Saddam's troops a free hand to put down the uprising.

Facing strategic defeat, the quietly spoken Barzani was forced to do the unthinkable and negotiate with Saddam, who had gassed the Kurds and buried them in mass graves years before.

Barzani was saved by a U.S. and British no-fly zone over the north which allowed him and his Kurdish rival Jalal Talabani to retake the area. The longest period of Kurdish autonomy in modern history followed, but the experience was scarred by war between Barzani and Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Barzani invited Iraqi government tanks into the enclave in 1996 to seize the regional capital Erbil, sending not only Talabani but CIA agents and their local employees fleeing.

GAMBLE ON INDEPENDENCE ENDS IN FAILURE

After decades of struggle, and Saddam’s overthrow in a 2003 U.S.-led invasion, critics say Barzani made one of his biggest errors by seeking a referendum on Kurdish independence in 2017.

The Baghdad government rejected it as illegal and sent troops to seize the oil city of Kirkuk, which the Kurds regard as the heart of any future homeland. A bitter Barzani stepped down as president of the regional government.

“I am the same Masoud Barzani, I am a Peshmerga and will continue to help my people in their struggle for independence,” Barzani said in a televised address.

“Nobody stood up with us, other than our mountains."

Barzani was born in 1946, soon after his legendary father, Mulla Mustafa Barzani, known as the Lion of Kurdistan, founded a party to fight for the rights of Iraqi Kurds.

Masoud Barzani became a guerrilla as a teenager, and over time he would become familiar with an abiding theme in Kurdish history - betrayal by regional and Western powers.

Exiled and dying of cancer in a U.S. hospital in 1976, Mulla Mustafa lamented that he had ever trusted the United States.

    A year earlier, Mulla Mustafa had been fighting a guerrilla war against Baghdad backed by Iran's pro-Western shah, but he was cut adrift when then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger brokered a deal that allowed Saddam to crush the Kurds.

During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, Barzani allied the KDP with Tehran once more. As a result, some 8,000 Barzani tribesmen were rounded up and paraded through Baghdad before being executed. In Saddam's words: "They went to hell."

In March 1988 Saddam's warplanes bombed the Kurdish town of Halabja with poison gas killing up to 5,000 people.

Despite the massacres, Barzani retained enough of a fighting force to respond to President George Bush's appeal for an uprising during the 1991 Gulf War, when a U.S.-led coalition routed Saddam’s army in Kuwait.

After Saddam's fall, Barzani became a central figure in the drive to create an autonomous Kurdish state in northern Iraq. Kurdish leaders kept their territory relatively free of the sectarian bloodshed that plagued most of Iraq. Western oil executives flocked to the region seeking deals.

STRAINS WITH BAGHDAD OVER OIL RESURFACE

Kurds showed their military capability by joining Iraqi government troops and Iranian-backed paramilitary forces to drive Islamic State militants out of Mosul.

Confident that the time was right for an independent homeland, Barzani pursued the disastrous referendum. A day after the vote he recalled the Kurds' seemingly endless suffering.

“I’ve been fighting for half a century. With my people I have been through mass killings, deportations, gassings. I remember times when we thought we were done for, headed for extermination," he told the Kurdish Rudaw news agency.

"I remember times, as in 1991 after the first war against Saddam, when the democracies came to our rescue but left the dictatorship in place, thus casting us back into the shadows."

Barzani's arch-enemy Saddam was executed in 2007. But tensions persist between the Kurds and Baghdad authorities.

Relations soured once again in February 2022 when Iraq's federal court deemed an oil and gas law regulating the oil industry in Iraqi Kurdistan unconstitutional and demanded that Kurdish authorities hand over their crude oil supplies.

Barzani criticised the move as a "completely political decision" aimed at opposing the Kurdistan region.

Barzani has kept a hand in politics through his KDP. The party swept the Kurdish vote in a 2021 election after forming an alliance with Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

(Writing by Michael Georgy, Editing by William Maclean)