KURDISTAN NEWS IN BRIEF (CLICK HEADLINES FOR FULL TEXTS)

After the Kurdish Hunger Strike in Turkish Prisons

The New Yorker – When winter hits Turkey, the fighting between the Army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.), which has been going on for nearly thirty years now, tends to slow. The P.K.K. is based in a mountainous region on the border with Iraq, and snow isolates its fighters—and creates new dangers for government forces. Earlier this month, seventeen Turkish soldiers were killed when their helicopter crashed in the mountains because of bad weather…

Turkey should boost Kurdish rights as violence grows

Reuters- Turkey should offer Kurds equal rights in language use, local governance, identity and political representation as the mainly Kurdish southeast seeks to avoid a worsening of the militant conflict in the region, a think tank said on Friday…

The Iraq – Kurdish Military stand off: and the winner is…

Niqash – Recently tensions between Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan have run high, complete with a military stand-off. The crisis seems to have been defused now. But if it was all just politics, then who won? And who lost – and why? The recent military standoff between forces from the semi-autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan and the central government in Baghdad over disputed territory has further exposed the tensions between the region’s president, Massoud Barzani, and the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki…..