Month: August 2014

A tanker carrying 1 million barrels of disputed Kurdish oil remains off Texas , according to the vessel’s operator. The United Kalavryta, which left Ceyhan, Turkey , on June 23 and arrived off the coast of Galveston July 26, couldn’t be detected earlier this week, with no updates from the tanker’s Automated Identification System’s transponder from early Aug. 26 until today. The tanker is caught up in a protracted legal fight in Iraq over rights to Kurdish oil production and billions of dollars in overdue payments claimed by the Kurds. The U.S. government recognizes Kurdistan as part of Iraq. While a federal judge this week lifted an order that had authorized the seizure of the cargo if it came into U.S. waters, Iraq has more legal options available. “The M/T United Kalavryta is still anchored off Galveston awaiting charterer’s discharge orders,” Lygia Pirounaki, a spokeswoman for Marine Management Services […]

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The Kurdish government of Iraq said it’s expanding a humanitarian initiative tied to oil operations to address the influx of refugees fleeing the Islamic State. The Sunni-led Islamic State, a terrorist group known also as the Islamic State of Iraqi and Syria, has squared off against Kurdish forces as it tries to expand its claims to territory in the region. The semiautonomous Kurdistan Regional Government said Friday it was broadening its Kurdistan Oil and Gas Humanitarian Initiative to extend to new refugees and internally displaced persons. "The Kurdish Ministry of Natural Resources is pleased that a number of oil companies in the Kurdistan region have already asked how they can support humanitarian efforts for the massive new influx of refugees and IDPs," it said in a statement. "With the expansion of KOGHI, companies have an already established framework for providing funds." The Kurdish government says it launched the initiative […]

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WASHINGTON — The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has thrown Iraq into crisis, precipitated the ouster of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as prime minister and brought the American military back to the country it left more than two years ago. But now Obama administration officials are quietly acknowledging another important consequence: a far more autonomous Kurdistan. The United States still officially opposes Kurdish independence, a decades-old policy that seeks to avoid further inflaming the region and provoking Turkey, Iraq and Iran, three countries with large and restive Kurdish minorities. But the ISIS invasion has fundamentally changed the political geography of Iraq, senior American and Kurdish officials said, physically cutting off most of Iraqi Kurdistan from the rest of Shiite-dominated Iraq and encouraging the Iraqi Kurds in their drive for expanded autonomy. Masrour Barzani, the chief of intelligence for the Kurdish region of Iraq, said that the Obama administration, which […]

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A Kurdish tank faces toward ISIS lines on Aug. 26, 2014, a few kilometers away from the Khazir refugee camp, half way between Erbil and Mosul. (VIANNEY LE CAER/Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty Images) A Kurdish tank faces toward ISIS lines on Aug. 26, 2014, a few kilometers away from the Khazir refugee camp, half way between Erbil and Mosul. (VIANNEY LE CAER/Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty Images) Flames have engulfed oil facilities at the Ain Zalah field, in Iraq’s Ninewa province, after extremist militants fled the area following an offensive by Kurdish Peshmerga forces backed by ongoing U.S. air strikes.The Peshmerga also captured the nearby town of Zummar, just west of the Mosul Dam, which sits along a main road between Ain Zalah and Mosul, according to a Peshmerga officer, local residents, and a senior official from Iraq’s state-run North Oil Company (NOC).Militants have co… This content is for registered users. Please login to […]

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Forgotten in Iraq The world took notice when the Yazidis needed help. But since June, a Turkmen city in northern Iraq has been under siege by the Islamic State. The death toll continues to mount but, thus far, the people of Amirli have been left to fight the IS on their own. "Every day I receive about 100 patients. Every day there is shelling. Some of the injuries are very complicated, legs amputated, head wounds. But I don’t have the materials to provide serious treatment. There are cases where I have put patients on the helicopter alive and they die when they get to Baghdad." Dr. Khaldoun Mahmoud speaks extremely rapidly, and with good reason. There is only a single place remaining in the northern Iraqi town of Amirli where he still has a modicum of mobile phone reception: at the helicopter landing pad above the village. And with […]

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Kurdish Peshmerga fighter keeps watch at Omar Khaled village near Tal Afar, west of Mosul August 24, 2014. Old hostilities between Arabs and Kurds exacerbate fighting with the Islamic State. (Youssef Boudlal/Reuters) GWER, Iraq — Kurdish fighters are struggling to hold on to recent gains against Islamic State militants in Iraq in the face of constant shelling and sniper fire. But Kurds say the jihadists have another weapon: local Arab sympathizers. The Kurds suspect area Arabs have backed the militants in battles that have raged in Iraq’s north over the past month, including a stunning advance by the jihadists. The fighting has displaced thousands of families in a region long known as a flash point for Arab-Kurdish violence. Now many Sunni Arab residents are barred from coming home. “The Arabs here stabbed us in the back, and now they are threatening us” from the villages nearby, a Kurdish intelligence […]

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