As the conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran escalates, Iraq’s Kurdistan region continues to endure relentless fallout from a war its people did not want.

For more than five months, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq has sought to remain outside the conflict. Despite those efforts, hundreds of missiles and drones have struck the region, exacting what KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani described as “a heavy price,” according to Al Jazeera

“We have been targeted more than 1,000 times by missiles and drones directly from Iran or from inside Iraq by some of the militias. We think these are all unjustifiable attacks on Kurdistan. Unfortunately, we had casualties and we lost people. Many of our infrastructure have been hit badly,” Barzani said in an interview with Al Jazeera’s The Interview.

”The regional conflict and the security repercussions led to a 70 percent decrease in trade across the Kurdish region,” he added.

KRG data shows that strikes by multiple factions have hit not only military and security installations — including sites linked to Iranian Kurdish opposition groups — but also energy infrastructure and civilian areas across the region.

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The attacks struck at the heart of the region’s economy by crippling its vital oil and gas sector. Forced to relocate operations and capital, companies left a region already reeling from a severe budget dispute with the Iraqi federal government over civil service salaries and oil revenue sharing.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attacked the al-Harir Air Base near the regional capital of Erbil. Launching five missiles, the IRGC called the air base “the headquarters of the invading U.S. army.” 

However, Barzani said the base was empty and had not hosted U.S. troops for nearly a decade, since the defeat of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL).

According to an adviser in the Kurdistan Region, the U.S. has begun a “pre-planned” withdrawal from the region, the Pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat wrote. Patriot missile systems had already been transferred, along with most troops and heavy equipment.

“The scale of losses inflicted on the Kurdistan region as a result of the war, up to April, is estimated at one trillion and 500 billion Iraqi dinars ($1.14bn), and these figures were also handed over to the Iraqi government,” Peshawa Hawramani, spokesman for the KRG, told al-Jazeera.

Hawramani also stressed that the Kurdistan region is not directly involved in the war and warned that it would not allow its territory to be used as a staging ground against Iran.

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Factional crisis

According to Kurdish authorities, the identities of those responsible for the attacks have been delivered to the central government in Baghdad.

“These are factions that bear arms outside state institutions illegally, and yet, no measures have been taken so far by the Iraqi government towards these factions, whether the former or the current one,” the spokesman said.

Following Washington’s initial strikes on Iran, Iranian-backed militias and the IRGC have repeatedly targeted U.S. facilities in Iraqi Kurdistan. These forces have also struck Iranian Kurdish opposition groups in the area, spurred by reports of U.S. plans to arm those groups against Tehran.

Long before the U.S.-Iran war, the Iran-backed groups have been “a cause of destabilisation and a source of concern” for many Kurds in the region.

“The continuous shelling by armed groups operating outside the law, which are known to everyone, and which do not abide by the decisions of the commander-in-chief of the Iraqi Armed Forces, creates security problems for the Kurdistan region,” Jabbar Yawar, security expert and former secretary-general of the Ministry of Peshmerga in the KRG, said.

The economic fallout is also spreading across Iraq. The Ministry of Oil has declared force majeure — a contractual provision invoked when extraordinary events prevent obligations from being fulfilled — at oilfields operated by foreign companies, effectively suspending production without requiring compensation under affected contracts.

The move is said to come as shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz have effectively halted most of the nation’s crude exports.

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