Observers of Kurdish affairs have pointed out to issues such as politicization and, at times, lack of a coherent central command line in the ranks of the peshmerga as factors hampering the development of an official Kurdish army.
But building a united army, some experts warn, is not merely about gathering disparate forces under a nominal umbrella.
"The Lebanese experience showed that forming combat units of mainly one confessional group or another was not conducive to genuine integration and left the army vulnerable to splits. So integrating units thoroughly is important," Yezid Sayigh, a security and defense expert and senior associate at Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, told Al-Monitor.
Sayigh, who recently attended a conference in Erbil on ways to reform the peshmerga, believes "the partisan nature of various peshmerga units and commands is a serious impediment to operational effectiveness and opens the risk of splits and violence" as occurred during the Kurdish civil war in the mid-1990s.
The deficiencies were particularly laid bare during the first few months of the fight against IS.
In August 2014, IS routed the Kurdish forces in western and northern Ninevah province forcing tens of thousands of Yazidis, Christians and other residents of those areas to flee to Iraqi Kurdistan. The jihadist militants even made it as close as a dozen miles to Erbil.
But with assistance from the US-led international coalition, the peshmerga pushed IS back from much of the area it took from them. As IS was rolled back, the battlefield saw a mad dash as partisan peshmerga units rushed to stick their respective party's flags in the wake of every minor and major victory to prove it was their party that accomplished the task.
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