Month: August 2014

Haidar al-Abadi, the UK-educated engineer appointed to form a government in Baghdad The political crisis in Iraq intensified on Monday after the country’s president named a new prime minister to replace Nouri al-Maliki , raising fears of a prolonged power struggle amid the raging battle with Islamist insurgents. In a major blow to Mr Maliki, the largest grouping in parliament nominated Haidar al-Abadi, a member of Mr Maliki’s own Shia-dominated party, as prime […]

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;Iraq’s political crisis headed toward confrontation after the president designated the deputy parliament speaker to form the next government and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki dismissed the appointment, claiming he was the rightful nominee. President Fuad Masum selected Haider al-Abadi, a spokesman for Mr. Maliki’s own Dawa Party, after he was nominated by the largest political bloc earlier in the day. He now has 30 days to choose a new cabinet of ministers. "What happened had no value at all," Mr. Maliki said in a nationally televised address, flanked by a few dozen of his political allies. "My nomination is still valid and we will correct this mistake for sure." Mr. Maliki blamed his loss on U.S. diplomats, accusing […]

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Iraq ’s President Fouad Masoum asked the deputy speaker of parliament to try to form a new cabinet and end a three-month political stalemate that’s helped Islamist insurgents seize large swaths of the country. While the U.S. quickly backed Masoum’s designation of Haidar al-Abadi, embattled Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki rejected Masoum’s move, setting the stage for further political deadlock and potentially a confrontation after Maliki sent troops into the streets of Baghdad early today. Masoum tapped Abadi hours after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pulled support from Maliki, warning him not to hinder the political process while the country is under threat from the Islamic State’s advances across the north. The U.S. and Iraqi political parties have blamed Maliki’s divisive policies for the onslaught in northern Iraq by the Sunni militant group, and President Barack Obama has tied expanded U.S. military strikes against the al-Qaeda breakaway group to […]

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The Obama administration has begun directly providing weapons to Kurdish forces who have started to make gains against Islamic militants in northern Iraq, senior U.S. officials said Monday, but the aid has so far been limited to automatic rifles and ammunition. Previously, the U.S. sold arms in Iraq only to the government in Baghdad, which has largely failed in recent years to transfer them to the Kurdish forces in the north, American officials have said. Baghdad made some transfers with American help in recent days, since U.S. airstrikes began to support Kurdish forces fighting off the Islamic State advance toward the northern city of Irbil. But U.S. officials decided to begin their own deliveries. The Kurdish peshmerga fighters had been losing ground to Islamic State militants in recent weeks, in part because they were outgunned and at times ran out of ammunition, officials said. The weapons […]

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Production from the Atrush block in the Kurdish north of Iraq should start in 2015 but operations are on hold because of the violence, energy company TAQA said. U.S. President Barack Obama ordered limited airstrikes against Sunni-led insurgents in the mountainous north of Iraq last week. In an address Saturday, the president said the strikes "successfully destroyed arms and equipment" held by the militants. The semiautonomous Kurdistan Regional Government last week said oil operations in the north deserved close monitoring, though were largely unaffected by the violence. Abu Dhabi National Energy Co., known by its Arabic initials TAQA, said it suspended operations at the region’s Atrush block as a security precaution. "TAQA has suspended its operations at the Atrush block as a result of recent developments and escalating instability around the Kurdistan Region of Iraq," it announced: Sunday. Several other energy companies operating in the area […]

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For months now, Sunni militants from the Islamic State (better known as ISIS ) have been seizing control of large swathes of Iraq. ISIS is now threatening a major oil-producing region of Iraq But it wasn’t  until they encroached into semi-autonomous Kurdish territory and near the Kurdish capital of Erbil — an oil boomtown full of Western companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil — that the Obama administration decided to authorize airstrikes against ISIS. That rather felicitous timing has already led a few commentators to  suggest that the current US intervention is all about oil. That’s probably overstating things — the US intervention seems to have a variety of goals here , like protecting the Kurds more generally and preventing ISIS from massacring Iraq’s Yazidis. But it’d also be wrong to pretend that oil is totally irrelevant to the larger crisis in Iraq. Iraq is currently the world’s seventh-largest oil […]

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