If you go back to the years before Saddam Hussein, to Salam Arif and his brother, Abdul Rahman Arif, one of the requests of Mustafa Barzani was religious unification in Iraq, that there should be all Muslims and nobody else.
I think you heard of that right back to the fifties or perhaps the sixties. I'm not saying that he's following in his father's steps but it is not that far from that statement at all.