Before Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021, many analysts speculated that he would adopt an overtly pro-Kurdish stance as the U.S. president. Those predictions were based on his time as a senator and vice president, when he fostered close relations with certain Kurdish communities in the Middle East.
But as Biden’s presidency comes to an end, his track record is underwhelming—littered with missed opportunities to support Kurds and Kurdish issues.
Ahead of the 2020 U.S. election, the think tank community in Washington, D.C., began to game out what a possible Biden administration might look like. Aykan Erdemir and Philip Kowalski of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies predicted in August 2020 that Biden, if elected, would be “the most pro-Kurdish politician ever to occupy the White House.”
This prediction excited Kurds, who live across several countries in the Middle East. Kurds are the world’s largest nation without a state, and international support is critical for their national and political aspirations.
Erdemir and Kowalski cited Biden’s initial support for the Iraq War, which Kurdish leaders backed; his controversial plans to deepen federalism in Iraq, which would have given even more autonomy to the country’s Kurdistan region; and his long-standing relationships with Kurdish leaders such as Masoud Barzani of Iraq’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).
Biden famously visited Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, in 2002—before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq—and he spoke warmly about Kurds in an address to the Kurdistan Parliament.
Biden had also criticized former U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies toward Kurds and raised expectations that the Biden administration would support Kurdish ambitions in northeastern Syria. In 2017, the Trump administration opposed the Iraqi Kurds’ plans to hold an independence referendum and sent a letter of warning to Erbil. Then, in 2019, Trump greenlit Turkey’s “Operation Peace Spring,” which resulted in the significant loss of Kurdish territory in Syria.
Four years later, Erdemir and Kowalski’s predictions have not panned out. Domestic U.S. economic and political crises—as well as other foreign-policy concerns, such as competition with China and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza—shifted the Biden administration’s attention away from the Kurds as major operations against the Islamic State wound down.
Approximately 40 million Kurds live in a mostly contiguous area spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Within that region, they are a majority population. Within each country, however, they are a minority. Since the end of World War II, Kurds have fought for self-governance and linguistic and cultural rights within their respective states. These efforts were largely repressed—often violently—by the central governments.
Due to their geopolitical predicament, Kurds have looked far beyond their homeland for support—including to the United States. Throughout his career, Biden had a strong track record of liaising with Iraq’s Kurds.
Located along the borderlands of Syria, Turkey, and Iran, Iraq’s Kurdistan region is geostrategically important. It gave the United States a platform to strike toward Kirkuk and Mosul from the north during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. More recently, the Kurdistan region was a key platform for fighting the Islamic State, with thousands of troops from the global counterterrorism coalition based there.
However, that coalition plans to wind down its mission by 2026, and the United States has also promised to end its current positioning at all bases in Iraq, including in the Kurdistan region, by September of that year.
During the Biden administration, as the Islamic State’s threats decreased, the United States began to scrutinize the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq more closely.
The United States found discouraging reports of Kurdish parties’ failure to work together to implement a cohesive governance program, hold elections on time, or protect freedom of expression. Kurdish ruling parties also failed to make progress when it came to depoliticizing and unifying the Peshmerga forces, which they had agreed to do as part of a 2022 memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Defense Department.
Meanwhile, as the broader situation in Iraq became more stable, Washington refocused its diplomatic energy away from Erbil and toward the federal government in Baghdad, which holds sovereign power over the whole country. In the past, chaos in central and southern Iraq had made the Kurdistan region an attractive alternative to Baghdad. But the increasingly stable administration under Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has allowed Washington to pursue long-delayed deals with Baghdad, particularly on security.
Iraqi Kurdish leaders were dismayed that the United States did not support them more in disagreements with Iraq’s federal government. For example, they wanted Washington to pressure Baghdad to resume oil exports via the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline. Erbil bristled at U.S. criticism of the Kurdistan region’s human rights record, too.
The KRG had also hoped that the United States under Biden would provide it with air defense systems, but this did not happen. When KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani visited Washington earlier this year, he was not granted a meeting with Biden. As a result, the relationship between Washington and Erbil drifted as mutual recriminations increased.
The 2022 memorandum of understanding between the Pentagon and the KRG will also end in 2026, likely without achieving most elements of Peshmerga reform. The primary responsibility for that lack of progress lies with the local Kurdish parties, but it is disappointing that the United States’ overwhelming leverage in this regard was not effective, given the amount of military aid and training Washington has provided the KRG over the years.
Next door in Syria, Kurdish forces took advantage of the chaos of the Syrian civil war by establishing a de facto area of autonomy in the northeastern part of the country. With U.S. support, the region’s Kurdish movement was able to fend off the Islamic State and the Syrian regime of now-ousted leader Bashar al-Assad—but it remains vulnerable to attacks by Turkey and its allies; Ankara does not want another Kurdish-led entity formalized on its southern border.
Until last month, this situation remained strategically the same as in 2020, but was increasingly fragile; the Biden administration opposed planned elections in Kurdish-held areas in September 2024. Now, the fall of the Assad regime raises urgent questions about how the Kurdish-led government and security forces in Syria’s northeast will integrate with the new central government.
At this lame-duck stage of Biden’s tenure, Washington does not seem to wield much influence over the structures emerging in Syria. Still, an estimated 2,000 U.S. troops remain in the country to maintain a bulwark against Islamic State. Their future looks increasingly tenuous in the face of the new government in Damascus and the end of the international counterterrorism coalition’s mission in Iraq.
The issue of how to deal with imprisoned Islamic State fighters and their families also remains unresolved. Syrian Kurdish officials want foreign countries to repatriate their citizens from Syria and set up an international tribunal to prosecute the others, but progress remains slow. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s dim view of the U.S. presence in Syria—and his admiration for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—may signal the end of robust U.S. support for Syrian Kurds.
“The fact that policies such as reducing the U.S. military presence in the region are on the agenda means that [northeastern Syria] may face more security problems in the future,” said Zozan Yasar, a Kurdish journalist and researcher. “The situation does not seem sustainable.”
The Biden administration has refrained from commenting on Erdogan’s alleged violations of the human and civil rights of Kurdish politicians and activists. The White House has also remained quiet as Kurdish mayors have been removed from office across Kurdish-majority areas of Turkey and replaced by officials appointed by Erdogan’s government.
And critically, Ankara continues to oppose U.S. support for Syrian Kurdish authorities as part of the fight against the Islamic State and Turkish forces regularly attack northeastern Syria. Despite some recent optimism, the prospect for peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party remains unclear.
On Iran, Biden’s policy was largely focused on the central government, rather than the country’s Kurds. The exception came during the protests in late 2022 that followed the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died of injuries sustained while in the custody of Iran’s so-called morality police.
While the Biden administration decried Tehran’s crackdown on the demonstrations, it did little of substance to respond or expand its criticism to apply to the Kurdish population more broadly. Predominantly Kurdish areas of Iran are among the country’s poorest and are hard hit by the economic effects of U.S. sanctions. Moreover, the group faces harsh crackdowns by the Iranian security forces for cultural, linguistic, and political activism. Last year, nearly one-fifth of all those executed in Iran were Kurdish—out of proportion to their population share of around 10 percent.
Historically speaking, being “the most pro-Kurdish politician ever to occupy the White House,” in Erdemir and Kowalski’s words, is a low bar to clear. Biden’s record probably does not match that of either Bush presidency, when Iraq’s Kurds were able to achieve autonomy from Baghdad under the U.S.-imposed no-fly zone in 1992 and then formalized it under the country’s new constitution in 2005.
Now, Kurds are girding for the return of Trump, whose record on Kurdish issues during his first term was equally tumultuous.
“Trump’s return to power could mean that the Kurds will receive even less support from the U.S., and the Kurds’ situation could be more uncertain,” said Yasar, the Kurdish journalist.
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