|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
By Joe Torre and Tom Verducci
$17.79
By Gina Nahai
$11.20
$21
|
|
|
|
irrezolut (CC BY-SA 2.0)
|
By Greg Muttitt, TomDispatch —
Big Oil has replaced U.S. troops in Iraq, and the country’s oil output, crippled for decades, is growing again, with Iraq recently reclaiming the number two position in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Now there’s talk of a new world petroleum glut. So is this finally mission accomplished?
This piece originally appeared at TomDispatch.
Posted on Aug 23, 2012
READ MORE 
|
World Economic Forum / Andy Mettler (CC-BY-SA)
|
Turkey is no Libya or Syria in terms of repression, but the country has a few million disgruntled Kurds who would like more autonomy. One Kurdish political leader is threatening civil disobedience ... (more)
|
Wikimedia Commons
|
Iraq, or more poignantly Kurdistan, is back in the news after a prominent Iraqi Kurdish leader insisted on the Kurds’ right to self-determination, an issue that has roiled the region’s politics for the past … well, forever it seems.
|
DoD / CWO2 Michael A. Lujan, USMC
|
The Turkish military launched an airstrike aimed at Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq on Sunday. It was the latest in a series of cross-border attacks authorized by the Turkish parliament in response to what it has criticized as the Iraqi government’s lack of attention to the Kurdish fighters.
Posted on Oct 12, 2008
READ MORE 
|
independent.co.uk
|
By Robert Fisk — Three bodies lie beside a Baghdad street on a blindingly hot day. The one on the right is dressed in a white shirt and bright green trousers, his hands tied behind his back. Two others on the left lie shoeless, both dressed in check shirts, dumped—how easily we use that word of Baghdad’s corpses—on a yard of dirt and bags of garbage. They, too, of course, are now garbage.
|
|
A week after Turkey withdrew troops from northern Iraq, claiming its military initiative against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was successfully completed, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani met with Turkish President Abdullah Gul to try to figure out how regional tensions might be contained in the future.
|
|
On Tuesday, the Iraqi Cabinet expressed extreme displeasure over the incursion of Turkish troops into the Kurdish northern region of Iraq and called for a halt to Turkish interference, which Cabinet officials called a “violation of Iraqi sovereignty.” Also on Tuesday, an apparent suicide attack on a bus headed toward Syria from Mosul in northern Iraq killed nine people, according to The New York Times.
|
news.bbc.co.uk
|
Turkey has dramatically ramped up its cross-border campaign against Kurds in Iraq with an airstrike involving as many as 50 warplanes. The Turkish military says the assault was aimed at Kurdish rebels seeking refuge in Iraq and not “people living in northern Iraq or local groups not engaged in enemy activity.”
|
sunsearch.info
|
The Turkish parliament has authorized military incursions into Iraq in order to track down rebels who, the Turkish government has long claimed, use Iraqi Kurdistan as sanctuary.
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — The next time you hear confident assurances from the White House and its supporters that the “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq is working and that something called “victory” is now within sight, remember the Yazidis.
|
|
A raid on a Turkish military camp by Kurdish separatist rebels left at least seven Turks and one rebel dead on Monday and seven more soldiers injured, according to the BBC. The attack took place in the eastern town of Tunceli in the Pulumar region and is being attributed to the controverial Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
|
militaryphotos.net
|
The Bush administration finds itself in a difficult position as tensions between two regional allies threaten to escalate to war. The Turkish military is fed up with Kurdish rebels it says have safe harbor in northern Iraq, and now wants to mount an assault across the border. One of Iraq’s Kurdish leaders has said such an attack would trigger retaliation.
|
aljazeera.net
|
Eight Iraqi soldiers were killed and six wounded on Friday, Iraqi officials reported, after an American helicopter mistook them for an al-Qaida cell and opened fire. The U.S. military, which says only five were killed, expressed its “deepest sympathies” for the friendly-fire deaths.
|
chanad.weblogs.us
|
After paying roughly $2,000 each for work in the Persian Gulf, a group of Sri Lankan migrant workers was taken to Iraq, where they survived a month of imprisonment until they managed to contact the U.N. The International Organization of Migration says worsening conditions in Iraq have encouraged such abuses by labor recruiters.
Posted on Feb 6, 2007
READ MORE
|
msnbc.com
|
According to Condoleezza Rice, President Bush authorized the recent seizure of Iranian operatives in Iraq. U.S. forces seized at least five Iranian officials from Iran’s consulate in Irbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, prompting a confrontation with Kurdish forces. Update: Iran has called the consulate seizures illegal and demanded that the prisoners be returned.
|
apan-info.net
|
Just hours before the president’s national address, during which he accused Iran of supporting attacks on American troops, U.S. forces raided the Iranian consulate in Erbil, Kurdistan, abducting at least five people and seizing documents and other property, according to eyewitnesses.
|
Reese Erlich
|
By Reese Erlich — The award-winning investigative journalist probes the divided loyalties of Iraqi Kurdistan, where U.S. trainers are working to fold political militias into the Iraqi army.
|
Courtesy Reese Erlich
|
By Joshua Scheer — Investigative reporter Reese Erlich, just back from a tour of the Middle East, tells Truthdig that the U.S. efforts to promote democracy in that part of the world are beset by religious fundamentalists on one side and unabashed kleptocrats on the other.
|
AP / Hasan Sarbakhshian
|
By Parag Khanna — The semiautonomous northern region of Iraq is an island of relative stability in an ocean of turmoil. If America does not support Kurdistan’s independence, we may well lose our best shot of having a desperately needed secular ally in the region. New America Foundation fellow Parag Khanna, just back from the area, reports.
|
Yahya Ahmed / AP
|
Remember Kurdistan, that semiautonomous northern part of Iraq that the U.S. always points to as a model of stable, quasi-democratic governance? Well, corruption up there is so systemic that thousands of people vented their anger by burning down a government museum. The horrible irony: The museum commemorates the thousands of Kurds who died in Saddam Hussein’s 1988 gas attack. It had become an emblem of government greed.
Another front just opened up in the Iraqi civil war that the Pentagon claims doesn’t exist.
|
AP
|
The rebuilding of Iraq was hobbled and mismanaged from the get-go, according to an official history of the program leaked to the New York Times. | story
The Kurds, in exchange for a quasi-autonomous secular state of their own, will allow Shiite theocracy to dominate the rest of the country. Hardly the neocon fantasy of a secular, united and American-friendly Iraq. | story
Meanwhile, a mass exodus of Iraq’s professional, educated class is resulting in a brain drain, just when the country needs its thinkers most. | story
Also, an influential cleric who has led uprisings against the U.S. says that his militia would defend Iran if it was attacked. | story
Posted on Jan 23, 2006
READ MORE
|
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Lock Up Washington
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
