Exiled Kurdish forces in Iraq feel abandoned by west and say they need weapons like in Ukraine

Picking through a pile of twisted metal, Rebaz, a Kurdish Iranian fighter, stooped to cradle a jagged chrome piece that was dug from the ruins of his base. “This was part of a Fateh missile,” he said. “It’s one of the biggest that the Iranians have in their arsenal. It’s from the day they tried to wipe us out.”

The heap included other wreckage – of rockets and kamikaze drones that had devastated this small outpost, just east of Erbil in northern Iraq, a fortnight ago. Since then, jittery guards had looked from the ruins towards the east, from where more than two dozen ballistic missiles and another dozen kamikaze drones blazed from a blue sky a fortnight ago.

Analysis: Kurdish officials are considering allying with Iranian interests to finally form a government in Baghdad

A parliament besieged by protesters, a country adrift nine months after an election, a feud between domestic blocs and Iranian proxies: for many Iraqis, the latest political crisis is nothing new.

But to many observers this standoff appears more complex and protracted than most over the more than two decades of efforts to root a democratic state in Iraq. From the Kurdish region in the north to Anbar province in the west and the Shia communities in the south, there appears to be little hope that a government pursuing a collective national interest can emerge from the power struggle.