The word Peshmerga is made up of two parts in the Kurdish language: pêsh, meaning ‘before’ or ‘in front of’, and merge, meaning ‘death’. Together they give the phrase that has defined Kurdish armed resistance for generations: those who face death, or those who go before death. It is a name that was not invented by a government or a committee. It grew from the mountains, from the reality of men and women who fought in conditions where survival was far from guaranteed. Understanding Peshmerga history means understanding something central to how Kurds have experienced the twentieth century and beyond.
Roots in the mountains
Long before the word Peshmerga became widely known outside Kurdistan, Kurdish armed groups had existed in various forms for centuries. The terrain of the Zagros and Taurus mountains made large conventional armies difficult to deploy, and local fighters had always played a role in the politics of the region. Tribal confederations maintained their own armed men, loyal first to a chief or an agha, and these groups shifted alliances according to the pressures of the Ottoman, Safavid and later the modern nation states that divided Kurdish lands after the First World War.
The term Peshmerga in its modern sense became closely associated with the organised Kurdish national movement that took shape in the mid-twentieth century. The Kurdistan Democratic Party, founded in Mahabad during the short-lived Republic of Mahabad in 1946, adopted the word to describe its fighters. From that point, Peshmerga carried a specific political and nationalist meaning alongside its older, more general sense of an armed Kurdish irregular.
From Mulla Mustafa to a national institution
The figure most associated with the early Peshmerga as an organised force is Mulla Mustafa Barzani, the military and political leader who spent decades fighting for Kurdish rights in what is now the Bashur (Iraqi Kurdistan) region. After the collapse of the Mahabad Republic, Barzani led a famous march with his fighters through the mountains into the Soviet Union, returning years later to resume the struggle. The Peshmerga under his command fought a series of uprisings against the Iraqi government, the most significant of which took place in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Those decades were marked by cycles of fighting, ceasefires and broken agreements. The Algiers Accord of 1975 between Iraq and Iran cut off outside support for the Kurdish movement almost overnight, and the Peshmerga were forced to disperse. Many went into exile. But the force regrouped, and when the Iran-Iraq War created new openings in the 1980s, Kurdish parties, including both the KDP and the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan led by Jalal Talabani, rebuilt their armed wings. The suffering of that decade, including the Anfal campaign and the chemical attack on Helebce (Halabja), is part of the history the Peshmerga lived through as fighters and as people.
After 1991 and into the modern era
The Gulf War of 1991 and the establishment of a no-fly zone over northern Iraq changed everything. For the first time, a large part of Bashur came under Kurdish administration rather than Baghdad’s control. The Peshmerga became, in effect, the standing army of an emerging self-governing region. That transition from guerrilla movement to formal military institution was not always smooth. The 1990s saw a painful internal conflict between KDP and PUK forces that divided the region and left deep scars. A peace agreement eventually ended the fighting, and the two administrations later unified under the Kurdistan Regional Government.
In the years that followed, the Peshmerga were formally integrated into a unified command structure, though in practice the two main parties retained significant influence over their own units. The force gained international attention again in the mid-2010s when it took a leading role in the fight against the Islamic State group in northern Iraq and Syria, a campaign that drew support, training and equipment from a broad international coalition. Women’s units, which had existed in various forms since the earlier decades of the movement, became more prominent during this period and attracted particular attention from journalists and documentary makers around the world.
What the word carries
Today the Peshmerga are the official defence force of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, with a formal structure, uniforms and an established chain of command. And yet the word itself has not lost the weight it carried in the mountains. For many Kurds, calling someone a Peshmerga is still an expression of respect, a recognition of sacrifice. Older generations remember fighters who had nothing but a rifle and the landscape on their side. The name connects those memories to the present.
Peshmerga history is a subject our listeners know from many different angles, depending on which part of Kurdistan their family comes from and which generation they belong to. If you have stories, songs or memories connected to the Peshmerga that you would like to share, we would be glad to hear from you at Kurdistan.fm.