An Iraqi-forces member took down Kurdish flags during an operation against Kurdish fighters on Monday. Iraqi forces’ push into the territory is the latest turn in a tumultuous period in the region.

On Sunday, Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s chief spymaster, travelled to the Iraqi city of Sulaimaniya to meet with the leaders of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or P.U.K., one of the two main Kurdish political parties. For years, the P.U.K. and its sister party, the Kurdish Democratic Party, or K.D.P., have been struggling to break away from the rest of Iraq and form an independent state. A Kurdish republic is opposed by all the region’s countries—the governments in Baghdad, Turkey, and Iran—which fear that sizable Kurdish minorities in all three nations will begin to act autonomously. Only weeks ago, in a region-wide referendum, Iraq’s Kurds voted overwhelmingly to secede. The Kurdish dream, it seemed, was tantalizingly within reach.

It is not known what Suleimani—the Middle East’s most cunning operative—told the P.U.K.’s leaders. But, within hours, their fighters began abandoning their posts, making way for Iraqi military units just across the front lines. Not long after, Iraqi forces took over the former Kurdish positions and a stretch of oil fields near the city of Kirkuk. With the Iraqi Kurds now split in two—the P.U.K. on one side and the K.D.P. on the other—hopes for an independent Kurdish state appear to be fading fast. “It was a horrible, horrible betrayal,” a senior official in the Kurdish Regional Government told me.

On the P.U.K. side, the deal was struck by the survivors of Jalal Talabani, the group’s longtime chief and a former Iraqi President, who died earlier this month: his widow, Hero; his son Bafil; and his nephew Lahur. It’s not clear what was included in the deal, but the speculation is that Suleimani offered a mix of threats and inducements, including money and access to oil-smuggling routes. “Everyone is calling it the P.U.K. drug deal,” a former senior American official who works in the region told me. Notably, many P.U.K. units refused the order to stand down and fought the oncoming Iraqi units.

The deal struck by Suleimani, and the push by Iraqi forces into the Kurdish territory, is the latest turn in a tumultuous period in the region. It started in the summer of 2014, when the Islamic State swept out of the Syrian desert and captured a huge swath of northern and western Iraq, rolling over the Iraqi Army in the process. When ISIS fighters reached the outskirts of the Kurdish region, they were beaten back by the Kurdistan regional army known as the peshmerga—in the Kurdish language, “those who face death.”