Since its onslaught on Mosul one year ago, IS has penetrated the Kurdistan Region on different fronts. The most evident has been along the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) new 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) front-line of the disputed territories, which has become a battlefield between radical Salafist-Sunni Arab nationalists, foreign fighters and Kurdish peshmerga. IS threats have also become embedded in the massive demographic shifts and spillover of Sunni Arab displaced persons into the Kurdistan Region — some 20% of the total Iraqi Sunni Arab population. These external threats have mandated vigilant KRG border security and travel limitations on mainly Arab populations to and within Iraqi Kurdistan.

Yet, IS has also targeted the Kurdistan Region by recruiting and radicalizing Kurdish youth. According to the KRG Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs, at least 500 Iraqi Kurdish youths have thus far joined IS to fight on the battleground in Mosul and Syria. One vehicle of local recruitment is the Kurdish mosques, and through local extremist Salafist clerics. Two of the most influential of these cleric-recruiters are Imam Gailani from Sulaimaniyah and Mullah Shwan, a well-known mullah linked to a mosque in Erbil under the auspices of the KRG’s Ministry of Religious Endowments. Mullah Shwan’s defection to IS was particularly shocking because he was considered a moderate religious leader and friend to the KRG Ministry of Religious Endowments.

What explains this turn to IS by otherwise moderate Kurdish Sunni Muslims within the relatively prosperous Kurdistan Region? Radicalization is not a new phenomenon in Iraqi Kurdistan and is as much politically and economically inspired as it is ideologically motivated.