Regional Guard Brigades

The Regional Guard Brigades (Kurdish: لشكری پشتیوانی هەرێمی, romanized: Leshkrey Piştîwanî Herêmî, RGBs) are one of the main military formations of the Peshmerga, the armed forces of the Kurdistan Region. The brigades were created as part of efforts to unify the party-based Peshmerga forces under a more centralized command. Numbering several dozen brigades, they are formally under the authority of the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs (MoPA), though in practice many remain aligned with the two dominant Kurdish political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The Regional Guard Brigades have been deployed most notably in the War against the Islamic State (ISIS) from 2014 onward.