Over the past two months – between natural disasters and the actions of a heavily armed gunman firing from a high-rise hotel – citizens of the United States have faced the kind of havoc and violence that people in other parts of the world have been enduring routinely. Sunday night’s mass shooting in Las Vegas…
“We could arrive suddenly one night” was the common front-page headline in several Turkish newspapers Sept. 26. In a chorus, the papers were trumpeting the warning of military action that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had issued to the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) the day before over its independence referendum. The Turkish army had already…
Syrian forces with the support of their Russian and Iranian allies, crossed the Euphrates River near the city of Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria. The move is not only a significant step forward in restoring security nationwide and ensuring the nation’s territorial integrity, it is also a significant step toward turning the tables on the…
The Iraqi government has banned international flights to the Kurdish capital Irbil from 6pm this Friday, isolating the Kurds in Iraq to a degree they have not experienced since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The isolation is political as well as geographical as traditional Kurdish allies, like the US, UK, France and Germany,…
Whether Iraqi Kurdistan’s independence vote leads to statehood remains to be seen, but the referendum has led to other impressive things. Ankara today stands together with Tehran and Baghdad — the same neighbors it was slamming for “Persian expansionism” and sectarian policies yesterday. The trilateral front, driven by a shared fear of partition, is hailed…
The Kurdish region in Iraq held a “referendum” about splitting off from Iraq to form an independent state. The referendum was highly irregular and the outcome was assured. That such a referendum was held now had more to do with the beleaguered situation of the illegitimate regional president Barzani than with a genuine opportunity to…
