Patriotic Union of Kurdistan

The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) is a social democratic political party in Iraqi Kurdistan that split from the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) in 1975. The group is led by Jalal Talabani and draws its support predominantly from the southern region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Along with the KDP, the PUK is the largest and most powerful Kurdish party in Iraq. The PUK was active in the 1991 Kurdish rebellion against the Iraqi government and fought the KDP in the Kurdish Civil War between 1994-1998. The PUK signed a U.S. mediated ceasefire with the KDP in 1998. The two groups ran together in the 2005 and 2009 Kurdistan elections, and they jointly administered the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). The PUK and KDP ran separately in the 2013 elections. Together, the PUK and KDP together can field roughly 75,000 fighters known as the peshmerga. Since 2014, the pershmerga have been active fighting the Islamic State (IS) in northern Iraq. The PUK has been implicated in the kidnappings of many western nationals in Iraq and was accused of using indiscriminate violence and terror tactics during the Kurdish Civil War. However, the group has not been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, United Nations, or European Union. As of 2019, the group is estimated to have roughly 150,000 members.