Category: Iraq

The Iraqi Parliament met on Tuesday hoping to elect a speaker, in efforts to reach a political breakthrough that could ultimately lead to the formation of a new government. The meeting came as the Iraqi Army launched a major air assault on Tikrit in an effort to flush out the remaining Sunni militants in that city, which lies 95 miles north of Baghdad. The leading candidate for the post of speaker is Salim al-Jubouri, a member of the main Sunni bloc in Parliament. He was selected on Saturday by the Sunni bloc and his candidacy was being voted on by the full Parliament on Tuesday morning. The effort to elect a speaker came after the United Nations warned of “chaos” if lawmakers failed to start the process of forming a government. By custom, a Sunni holds the position of speaker in the Parliament, a Kurd holds the […]

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Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani (R) is received by his Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul. Photo: DHA Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani (R) is received by his Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul. Photo: DHA ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani was in Ankara Monday for important talks on oil exports and revenues, officials said. Safeen Dizayee, spokesman of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), told Rudaw that the visit could mean Kurdish civil servants finally getting paid at the end of this month, after going without salaries since Baghdad froze budget payments early this year. “We requested that Turkey import more Kurdish oil,” Dizayee said. He revealed that current exports were 120,000 barrels per day (bpd), and that “we will try to raise the rate to 400,000 bpd by the end of the year.”  Despite the fact it has at least $93 million in its account at Halkbank, […]

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In the coming weeks, Iraq ’s leaders must make existential decisions. If they cannot form a unity government led by a new prime minister and motivate Sunni moderates and tribes to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria , Iraq is likely to disintegrate. If the central government fails to grant satisfactory concessions to Sunnis and Kurds, the Kurds will push for sovereignty and independence. The Kurds are serious, and the international community must adapt to this emerging reality. While all Iraqi leaders bear responsibility for resolving the current crisis, the greatest share lies with the country’s Shiite politicians, who dominate the central government. Shiite parties must select a candidate for prime minister who can share power, decentralize the government and depoliticize the security forces. As a prerequisite for working with the central government, Kurdistan seeks the right to export its own oil; integrate Kirkuk and […]

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Iraq’s newly elected legislature failed to agree on a new parliament speaker during its second seating on Sunday, further extending a political impasse that has dashed hopes of reaching a political resolution to the worst security crisis to afflict the country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Parliamentarians met briefly on Sunday morning but adjourned almost immediately after Mehdi Hafez, the legislature’s interim speaker, announced that deputies hadn’t yet reached an agreement on a new speaker. The next session will be held on Tuesday, he said. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Baghdad on June 23. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images U.S. diplomats and other international observers have urged Iraqi politicians to reach a hasty agreement over the parliament speaker, the president and the prime minister—the so-called "presidencies" who are traditionally split between Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Shiite Arabs, respectively. But the abiding […]

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Responding to an appeal from Shi’ite clerics, Salah al-Wa’ili signed up earlier this month with a militia near Baghdad fighting the Islamist insurgents who have swept through northern Iraq and threatened the capital. A week later the 27-year-old part-time fighter was dead. Killed in battle against Sunni militants near the western city of Ramadi on Friday, he joined the growing list of casualties from the latest wave of conflict to strike Iraq, which has been plaged by war, sanctions and sectarian strife for longer than Wa’ili’s brief lifetime. For relatives who buried him on Friday in the sprawling and ever more crowded cemetery known as the ‘Valley of Peace’, outside the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf, grief was mixed with a bleak familiarity. Salah was laid to rest in a family plot next to the graves of three generations of relatives killed in conflict and […]

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Responding to an appeal from Shi’ite clerics, Salah al-Wa’ili signed up earlier this month with a militia near Baghdad fighting the Islamist insurgents who have swept through northern Iraq and threatened the capital. A week later the 27-year-old part-time fighter was dead. Killed in battle against Sunni militants near the western city of Ramadi on Friday, he joined the growing list of casualties from the latest wave of conflict to strike Iraq, which has been plaged by war, sanctions and sectarian strife for longer than Wa’ili’s brief lifetime. For relatives who buried him on Friday in the sprawling and ever more crowded cemetery known as the ‘Valley of Peace’, outside the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf, grief was mixed with a bleak familiarity. Salah was laid to rest in a family plot next to the graves of three generations of relatives killed in conflict and […]

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A classified military assessment of Iraq ’s security forces concludes that many units are so deeply infiltrated by either Sunni extremist informants or Shiite personnel backed by Iran that any Americans assigned to advise Baghdad’s forces could face risks to their safety, according to United States officials. The report concludes that only about half of Iraq’s operational units are capable enough for American commandos to advise them if the White House decides to help roll back the advances made by Sunni militants in northern and western Iraq over the past month. Adding to the administration’s dilemma is the assessment’s conclusion that Iraqi forces loyal to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki are now heavily dependent on Shiite militias — many of which were trained in Iran — as well as on advisers from Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force. Shiite militias fought American troops after the United States invaded Iraq […]

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As Iraq’s deadlocked Parliament was again unable to reach a deal to name a new speaker on Sunday, Sunni militants carried out a raid near Baghdad, a symbolically significant attack signaling their intent to move closer, even if only by a few miles, toward the Iraqi capital. Although the pretext for the delay was a severe sandstorm that prevented northern Iraq’s Kurdish lawmakers from flying to Baghdad, the real reason appeared to be that last-minute deals between the largest Shiite bloc and the Sunnis were falling apart. “We were ready, we came with our candidates, but the others haven’t presented their candidates,” said Usama al-Nujaifi, the Sunni lawmaker, who served as speaker in the last Parliament but has agreed not to run this time. “The country is completely collapsing and we need to unify the nation — the delay means more killing, more displaced and more emigration,” […]

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The dangerous struggle between the leadership of Iraq and the country’s Kurdish minority intensified Friday, as the Kurds seized two oil production facilities in Kirkuk Province and the prime minister announced that he was appointing a temporary replacement for the foreign minister. The prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, moved to replace the current foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, with Hussain Shahristani, a Shiite from Mr. Maliki’s bloc. Mr. Maliki was responding to a decision by Mr. Zebari and other Kurdish cabinet members to boycott cabinet meetings in protest of Mr. Maliki’s searing criticism of the Kurds this week. In a televised address on Wednesday, Mr. Maliki charged that the Kurds were harboring Sunni militant opponents of the central government and were even allowing members of the group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which swept through northern Iraq in June, to […]

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Oil production from the Kurdistan region of Iraq increased by more than 50% last month, despite violence in the country’s north and as logistical problems at the port of Basra cut exports from the south. The shifting nature of Iraq’s oil sector reflects political developments in the country. In a bid to gain greater independence, the Kurdistan Regional Government has taken advantage of its relative stability to increase oil exports in the past two months, infuriating Baghdad which claims sovereignty over the country’s natural resources. Meanwhile, the federal government is struggling to contend with a Sunni extremist insurgency in the north and west, led by the group that calls itself Islamic State, that has shut the country’s largest refinery and cut output from the giant Kirkuk field to a trickle. Production from Iraqi Kurdistan rose to 360,000 barrels a day in June, an increase of 130,000 […]

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