Six countries including the main Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations met in New York City for the first time since a rift led to a blockade on Qatar 15 months ago.

Friday’s meeting took place on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, and was the first gathering of its kind since Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severed diplomatic and trade ties with Qatar on June 5, 2017.

The blockading quartet accuse Qatar of having close ties to regional rival Iran and harbouring “terrorism” – allegations Doha strongly denies.

Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from New York, said the move was “quite significant” since it was the first time all parties met face to face over the issue.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spearheaded the talks.

“The idea behind this meeting is that the Americans are trying to build some sort of regional alliance called an Arab NATO to contain what the US sees as Iran’s growing influence in the region,” Ahelbarra said.

Among things discussed were the strengthening of military ties, as well as economic and diplomatic relations.

Pompeo said earlier this year during a visit to Saudi Arabia that “Gulf unity is necessary and we need to achieve it”.

‘Productive’ meeting

Immediately after the meeting, Qatar’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told Al Jazeera the talks were “productive”.

“[The meeting was] about the Middle East strategic alliance and the GCC relations with the US, plus Egypt and Jordan,” he said.

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said at UNGA earlier this week the blockading nations could wait decades for Doha to meet their controversial list of demands. 

When asked for Qatar’s response to the remarks, Sheikh Mohammed replied: “We have to address the challenges in our region first.

“A year from now, no one will know what the future of the countries will be… Qatar can also wait forever,” he added.

“Diplomacy means communication and engagement, and this is Qatar.”

Middle East condundrum

Ahelbarra noted the challenge facing the United States, which wants the parties to agree on a number of regional issues including the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.

“How can you bring together all of these people when they defer on every regional conflict,” Ahelbarra said.

“Unless you have all the parties agree, I don’t see how the Americans can build a regional alliance to contain all the problems in the region,” he said.

The US State Department said the ministers agreed on the need to confront threats from Iran and had productive discussions on setting up what is to be known as the “Middle East Strategic Alliance” to promote security and stability in the region.

The GCC is a political and economic alliance of six countries in the Arabian Peninsula: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Before the crisis, citizens of the GCC enjoyed a great deal of freedom of movement between the six member states, but that ended with the blockade. With close tribal ties, over generations thousands of intermarriages have been celebrated between Qataris and other GCC nationals, and those families are no longer able to see each other.

A landmark peace deal which for two decades allowed Iraq’s Kurdistan region to be an island of stability in an otherwise turbulent Middle East is unravelling today.

In 1998, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) reached a peace power-sharing agreement after nearly four years of civil war. Now 20 years later, the KDP is on its way to renege on its obligations and exclude the PUK from the next Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

The outcome of these renewed tensions between the KDP and the PUK will be determined by the upcoming parliamentary elections in the Kurdistan region. If the KDP gets the majority of the votes on September 30 and decides to sideline the PUK, Kurdistan might witness another wave of instability or even a violent conflict.

Personalised power and armed militias

On September 17, 1998, Jalal Talabani, leader of the PUK, and Massoud Barzani, the head of the KDP, came together in Washington DC to sign a US-brokered agreement to end hostilities.

Under the provisions of the deal, the two were to share political power and revenue, while the US was to provide military protection for the Kurdistan region as a whole. Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the agreement a “new and hopeful chapter”.

While the deal indeed provided hope and stability for the millions of Kurds living in Northern Iraq, it failed to bring unity. Barzani and Talabani treated the power-sharing agreement as just that – there was no attempt at integration or unification.

With the help of the revenue that started flowing in through the UN-sponsored food-for-oil programme, the two built their own clientelistic networks rendering the institutions of the KRG completely divided between the two parties.

Essentially, the KDP-PUK agreement helped create a highly corrupt system of cronyism where the two parties divided virtually all of the oil-rich region’s resources among themselves while putting their sons, daughters and extended families in senior government positions.

After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the deal extended to the central Iraqi institutions, which the Kurds could now participate in. Thus Talabani was allocated the largely symbolic position of president of Iraq (reserved for an ethnic Kurd), while Barzani took the presidency of the KRG.

More importantly, the two Kurdish leaders kept their armed militias, the Peshmerga, separate, making no effort to establish a unified armed force.

The war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) further strengthened these militias thanks to the unconditional military support of the US-led coalition. The necessary and immediate goal of defeating ISIL meant overlooking the danger that could arise from arming irregular armed groups.

So while the KDP and PUK fought with AK47s in the 1990s, today have a myriad of heavy weaponry available, including tanks and German-made anti-tank Milan missiles. While we, Kurds, are surely thankful for the weapons, which helped save us from ISIL, we would’ve been more appreciative if the US had used the existential threat to the KDP-PUK rule as an opportunity to pressure them into unifying the Kurdish militias.

The problem with personalised power – both political and military – is that its stability depends on one person; when that person is gone, a power vacuum and instability ensue. And this is what is happening in the Kurdistan region right now. Talabani died in October last year and his former deputy, Nawshirwan Mustafa, passed away five months earlier.

Now the weakened PUK is practically run by Talabani’s widow and his sons, including most notably Bafel Talabani, who heads a well-trained and equipped armed group which is loyal only to him and his party. PUK has not named a new official leader yet.

Meanwhile, KDP’s leader, Barzani, remains alive and well at 72, leading the strongest armed force in Iraqi Kurdistan. And he has his eye on PUK-controlled areas. On September 23, just a week before the vote, he paid a rare visit to Sulaymaniyah, the “capital” of the PUK, and told a cheering crowd, “Whoever agrees with us, we would agree and share a home with them. But those who are against this doctrine and goal, it’s difficult for them and us to be united and share a home.”

Escalating rhetoric and threats

While Barzani opted for innuendos at the Sulaymaniyah rally, this election season has seen a rhetorical war break out between his camp and the PUK. “Treason” is one word that has been doing the rounds in press statements by both sides.

Barzani has said that Kurdish unity has already been “destroyed” by what some PUK leaders, including its top commander, Bafel Talabani, did a year ago when they helped Iraqi forces and Iran-backed Shia militias take the oil-rich city of Kirkuk from the Kurds in the wake of the independence referendum. The PUK, on the other hand, has accused the KDP of “monopolising power”.

Such harsh rhetoric may sound like regular political vitriol used to rally voters during the election campaign season, but in Iraqi Kurdistan, these are real threats. In a conservative and highly militarised society such as Kurdistan, no matter the circumstances, KDP and PUK never accused each other of “treason” after they concluded peace. To me, this rhetoric is an eerie reminder of the civil war.

Today we have a dangerous situation in which one party feels stronger and more popular and therefore more entitled to rule the whole region while the other lacks leadership and leverage to negotiate.

The KDP has already taken steps to curb its rival’s power. Having declared the peace treaty dead, Barzani’s party is refusing to back PUK’s candidate Barham Salih for the Iraqi presidency and has nominated its own candidate, Fuad Hussein.

It is in this tense atmosphere that Kurds will be taking to the polls on Sunday. The 111 parliamentary seats will be contested by 21 parties, but none is expected to win 51 percent of votes to form a government on its own. Instead, KDP may choose to forge an alliance with some of the new parties such as Gorran (Change Movement, established by former PUK members) and the New Generation Movement (founded by Shaswar Abdulwahid, a Kurdish Donald-Trump-like real estate developer).

In Iraq’s May election these two opposition parties, which draw support from areas under PUK jurisdiction, got half as many seats in the Iraqi parliament as the PUK.

If these results repeat in the September 30 vote, would the PUK accept electoral defeat or a new political reality in which it no longer holds power? PUK leaders have made it clear that the answer is a categorical “no”.

“Even if we win only one seat, we are the PUK. We are armed. Nobody can disarm us,” warned senior PUK leader Mulah Bakhtyar in a recent interview with Iraqi Kurdistan’s Rudaw channel.

The situation is so dangerous that even the Americans are worried. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has had three phone calls with KDP leaders over the past month and a half to discuss Iraq’s government formation including the position of the presidency. While PUK has been historically close to Iran, its candidate Salih, who was educated in the West, seems acceptable to the US.

While no one wants to see the breakout of another Kurdish civil conflict in a region still recovering from the devastation of the war with ISIL, there are no guarantees that hostilities will not erupt after the elections.

We are undoubtedly entering a new era of politics in Iraqi Kurdistan marked by the demise of two-decade-long power-sharing agreement between the PUK and the KDP. In this sense, the September 30 election will be the first real litmus test for Kurdish democracy and its capacity to resolve political conflicts peacefully. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. 

The United Nations Human Rights Council has voted to extend an international probe of alleged war crimes committed in Yemen overriding objections from Saudi Arabia and Yemen itself.

Nations voted 21 to 8, with 18 abstentions, in favour of the resolution on Friday.

Supporters of the resolution, including Canada and the European Union, argued that an expert group mandated by the council last year still had work to do, but opponents said it would exacerbate the crisis and increase regional instability.

In a report last month, experts detailed evidence of possible war crimes committed in Yemen by the Saudi-backed coalition and Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

The report added that coalition air strikes caused “most of the documented civilian casualties” and voiced “serious concerns about the targeting process”.

The Yemeni government, which has accused investigators of bias, announced on Thursday that it was ending cooperation with the mission.

“The government refuses to extend the mission’s mandate because its findings, outlined in the report, did not meet the standards of professionalism and impartiality or the basic principles of the United Nations,” said a statement carried by the state-run Saba news agency.

It accused the UN group of “turning a blind eye” to the violations of the Houthi rebels, who the government has been battling since 2014.

The Saudi-led coalition has also dismissed as “inaccurate” and “non-neutral” the UN experts’ August 28 report.

Last week, Human Rights Watch accused Saudi Arabia of mounting a “campaign to discredit and undermine a UN investigation into abuses by all of Yemen’s warring parties”, calling it “yet another blatant attempt to avoid scrutiny of the coalition’s own actions in Yemen”.

Despite intense Saudi pressure, UN Human Rights Council renews UN investigation of the ongoing war crimes in Yemen, including Saudi-led bombing and blockading of civilians. Vote is 21 in favor, 8 against, 18 abstain, rejecting Saudi effort to buy its way out of scrutiny. pic.twitter.com/MrZYquzXPl

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) September 28, 2018

The UN said there have been nearly 10,000 confirmed deaths in the conflict since the coalition intervened in 2015, when the Saudi-led alliance entered the war to bolster Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

The conflict has triggered what the UN describes as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with three-quarters of the population – or 22 million people – in need of humanitarian aid.