ABSTRACT
The Kurdish uprising of 1991 resulted in the establishment of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The KRG satisfied all the criteria developed in this book to identify an entity as an unrecognised quasi-state. First, Iraq was a weak parent state which failed to recapture the KRI. Second, having some hundred thousand fighters, the KRI satisfied the militarisation criterion. Third, the KRG was involved in a relatively successful nation-building process. Fourth, protected by the US-led coalition, the KRG met the external patronage criterion. Thus, from 1992 to 2003, Kurds experienced their second unrecognised Kurdish quasi-state.
