Download or read book Kurdish Islamists in Iraq from the Muslim Brotherhood to the So-Called Islamic State written by Mohammed Shareef and published by King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS). This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The major Islamist groups in the Kurdistan region of Iraq have long been part of the political landscape both at the subnational Kurdistan level and at the Iraqi national level. They gradually emerged in the late 1980s and became more visible and pronounced as a result of the atrocities inflicted on the Kurdish people under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. Subsequently the Kurdish Islamist groups became a fixture on the formal Kurdish political stage in 1991 after the popular Kurdish uprising in the spring of that year. The Islamists have so far not become a major determining factor in Kurdish politics, yet they are nonetheless significant and effective. In the mid-1990s they became for a short while a vehicle for protest votes against the two major Kurdish political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan).