SHORT CUTS KURDISTAN – CLICK HEADLINES FOR FULL TEXTS
The Road to Kirkuk goes through Arbil
Today’s Zaman – If he had obtained a visa from Baghdad, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli would be visiting Kirkuk during Eid and attending a program organized in his honor…
In Syria, role of Kurds divides opposition
The Washington Post – Opponents of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad are showing signs of splintering along a deep regional fault line, with Arabs and Turks uneasy about a military offensive last month by Syrian Kurds, who overran four towns in the country’s north…
Baghdad and Erbil battle for Iraq
The National Interest
The August 1 announcement by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) that it was ready to resume oil exports through the Iraqi pipeline after a four-month suspension concluded what was rather like a nasty school-yard brawl in the manner such scuffles invariably end: with a bloody nose and some tears. Will a handshake soon follow?…
Is a Kurdish Spring on the Way?
The American Interest – The world has been mesmerized by the revolutionary upsurge across the Arab Spring as longstanding dictatorships fell under popular pressure. But are the Arabs the only people in the Middle East to get a spring?…
The Washington Post – Syria’s civil war is the decisive event in the remaking of the Middle East that began with the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor 21 months ago. The battle for Damascus has become the fulcrum of a now fully visible Sunni-Shiite struggle over the creation and control of an Islamic political order throughout the region.…
U.S. Says Iraqis Are Helping Iran to Skirt Sanctions
The New York Times – When President Obama announced last month that he was barring a Baghdad bank from any dealings with the American banking system, it was a rare acknowledgment of a delicate problem facing the administration in a country that American troops just left: for months, Iraq has been helping Iran skirt economic sanctions imposed on Tehran because of its nuclear program…