TODAY’S SHORT CUTS KURDISTAN (CLICK HEADLINES FOR FULL TEXTS)

Statement On Oil & Gas Policy by the Kurdistan Regional Government

Kurdistan Regional Government – The Kurdistan Regional Government is proud of the achievements of its oil and gas industry since the fall of the former regime in 2003. It expects the federal government of Iraq to be proud of them, too. Since oil exports from the Region started in 2009, billions of dollars have flowed into Iraq’s treasury from fields in Kurdistan that have been explored, discovered and developed under the KRG’s modern, progressive and investor-friendly petroleum regime…

Turkish Contradictions

Rudaw – I first developed a keen interest in Turkey and her politics in the early 1990s. Especially then, before Turkey’s importance in the world had grown to its current levels, people often asked me “Why Turkey?” My answer was, and still is, “It’s complicated.”…

Kurdish Issue Key To Erdogan’s Success

Al Monitor – Turkey is scheduled to hold local and presidential elections in 2014 and parliamentary elections the following year. Thus in 2013, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has the freedom to take political risks in trying to find a workable solution to the Kurdish issue…

Kurdish genocide in Iraq: Survivors tell their stories

International Business Times – Wherever he goes, Kamaran Haider carries with him a faded photograph of dead bodies cluttered outside his house in Halabja, in the Iraqi Kurdistan. The bodies, captured in the last throes of life, belonged to his mother, father, brothers and sisters. His loved ones were among the 5,000 people who died in April 1988 in one of Saddam Hussein’s most atrocious chemical attacks against the Kurdish population