Kurdish Democratic Party

The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) is a nationalist, populist Iraqi Kurdish political party. It was established in 1946 in Iranian Kurdistan with aid from the Soviet Union. The party is led by Masoud Barzani and ultimately seeks to establish an independent Kurdish state. The KDP has historically been the most powerful of the Kurdish nationalist organizations. Between 1946-2003, the KDP fought both the Iraqi and Turkish governments in multiple conflicts. In 1975, Jalal Talabani split from the KDP and founded the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Today, the KDP and PUK are the largest and most powerful Kurdish political parties in Iraq. Together, the PUK and KDP can field roughly 75,000 fighters known as peshmerga, which have been engaged fighting the Islamic State (IS) since 2013. In recent years the KDP has been heavily criticized for its corruption and violence against dissidents.