Iraq's current situation has come to resemble a tangled ball of yarn, with new complications and complexities arising daily.

President Donald Trump met in Davos, Switzerland, with both Iraqi Kurdish President Nechirvan Barzani and Iraqi President Barham Salih. Looming large in their talks was Iraq’s political future, Iran, and U.S. alliances in the region. Behind-the-scenes, much of the talk appears to center on a Trump administration push to forgo any more investment in Iraq, and to instead double down militarily in Iraqi Kurdistan. It’s a bad idea.

The Foundation for Research and Supervision believes that the lack of military capabilities is behind the dependence of Iraqi Kurdistan on the US military presence in the Kurdish region. 

Iraq’s instability and the ever-present threat of ISIS mean that the security partnership between the United States and the Kurdistan Regional Government will continue to be an important feature of American counterterrorism policy for years to come.

Two fighters, two guerrillas and two liberals on two sides of the earth. one in the far west and the other in the eastern part of the earth. One a villager who has been working as a builder since childhood to become the Middle East Liberation Architecture and another chose to become a physician in order to solve the chronic pain of colonialism in South America.

Dr. Nickolas Panayiotides believes both Ankara and Damascus are against Kurdish achievements in the north of Syria and there is convergence of interests between the two sides in regard with Kurdish actions in the region and neither country wanted the “Rojava democratic experiment” to succeed.

With the latest unexpected escalation between Iran and the United States in Iraq, the ongoing challenges of Syria have, for the moment, become a less-discussed point of regional tension. However, for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which precariously continues to control an autonomous region of Northeastern Syria, the last few months have tested the organization’s hold over the region.

Following a visit to Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin will join his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan Wednesday to open the TurkStream gas pipeline, a major energy project that analysts say will deepen ties between the two nations and expand Moscow’s political leverage in the region.

The U.S. assassination of Qassem Suleimani, the mastermind of Tehran’s foreign military operations, in Baghdad last week, suddenly made Iraq the front line in tensions between the United States and Iran. Barham Salih, a British-educated Kurd who spent years representing his party in Washington, was elected President of Iraq in 2018. Salih has been increasingly concerned about Iraq’s vulnerability since the Trump Administration blamed Iran for an air strike that damaged more than a dozen strategic oil installations in Saudi Arabia, in September. I’ve known Salih for more than a quarter century, including when he was in Washington and later when he became the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq. We began a conversation in September, at the U.N. General Assembly, about the danger that Iraq will become a war zone—again—only this time between the United States and Iran. I checked in with him again on Sunday to update 

Syrian farmers are suffering under the invasion of Turkey and its loyal armed Syrian factions against the Kurdish-Arab Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). 

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has turned Turkey from a peaceful country with exciting economic ambitions, to a military power, but his ambitions are dependent on external funding, prominent journalist Abdulrahman Al-Rashed said in an op-ed in Asharq al-Awsat. 

 “I didn’t want to come to Syria for two weeks and then leave,” Thomas McClure, a young freelance journalist from Manchester, England, told Al-Monitor. “I was interested in northeastern Syria’s political project. I wanted to do more research and to contribute to the media field.” To that end, McClure, along with Joan Garcia, Koni Docolomansky and Chloé Troadec, co-founded the Rojava Information Center (RIC), an independent media organization celebrating its one-year anniversary this month.

When you grow up with dengbej, as is the case with all Kurds who were born and raised on their ancestral lands, it will be part of you for the rest of your life. For Kurdish singers, that is even more the case.

Decades of attempting to solve the Kurdish issue with denial, repression, assimilation and destruction have led Turkey to a dead end. The issue has remained festering since Ottoman times, with a century of rebellions keeping it on the country's agenda. Yet it remains misunderstood by the majority of the country.

Gen. Mazloum Abdi, the commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), has a message for U.S. President Donald Trump: The United States must act now to bring Turkey in line with the terms of the U.S.-brokered cease-fire agreement and stop Ankara’s campaign to drive the vulnerable Kurdish minority out of Syria.