The organization was established in September 1993[2] and has been often referred to as an "intelligence agency",[3] "security force",[3] "security service",[4] "security",[5] "secret service",[6] "secret police",[7] or just "Kurdish police.

"[3] Asayish coordinates and shares information with Parastin u Zanyari, the investigative arms and intelligence gatherers operating in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq.

[2] Its official goals according to the Kurdistan Regional Government are the following: The organization has jurisdiction over a lot of things including: In 2009 Amnesty International accused Asayish of abusing human rights, including torture and other ill-treatment, and claimed that the agency was "above the law" in Iraqi Kurdistan.

[8] The Kurdistan Regional Government criticized Amnesty by stating: Most of the information provided in the report chronicles problems we had just after the fall of Saddam, when we were still subject to Saddam-era penal codes...Amnesty had a particular agenda and used dubious information, often very old, to paint an unrealistically harsh picture of the security forces in our Region by bringing up allegations of abuse at prisons such as in Akre, which have long been closed.In November 2016, Amnesty International reported that Kurdish authorities (namely Peshmerga and Asayish) had taken part in Kurdification, by forcefully displacing Arabs in Kirkuk by bulldozing homes and banishing the residents.

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