A week and a half of fighting around the perimeter of Iraqi Kurdistan has come to a halt, at least temporarily, with Iraq having announced a 24-hour ceasefire deal. The deal is intended to allow for deployments at the Iraqi border with Turkey.
Kurdish officials confirmed the ceasefire is in effect and holding, though they have denied that any permanent deal has yet been reached, leaving it really uncertain what’s going to happen in the next few days.
While Iraq doesn’t appear to be ruling out further actions, however, talk of a “joint technical team” being deployed into the Fish-Khabur border region, where the Kurdish oil pipeline crosses into Turkey, may suggest Iraq is close to having imposed the controls over Kurdistan they intended in the war.
Kurdish officials have already offered to “suspend” their secession efforts in return for a stop to Iraqi offensives. At this point, Iraq has all the control they need to make unilateral secession extremely difficult, and while they were previously demanding the Kurds formally cancel the referendum, it’s no longer clear they need to bother with that.