Saturday, December 10, 2022

Turkey continues to attack Iraq

MEHR NEWS AGENCY reports the Turkish government has again bohmbed northern Iraq, Duhok Province specifically, and reminds that it has "established 58 military bases" in the KRG over the last "two and a half years."









Staying focused on the Kurdistan, Amberin Zamin (AL-MONITOR) reports:

With its aura of relative calm and Western-friendly vibes, Iraqi Kurdistan was for decades hailed as the other Iraq. Today, Iraqi Kurdistan is under assault. Since early this year, Iran has carried out a series of cross-border missile and drone attacks against the Kurdish region, targeting its capital, Erbil, and more recently Iranian-Kurdish militias, which Tehran blames for the mass protests that have rocked the country since the Sept. 16 death in police custody of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini. Dozens of people including women and children have died in the strikes, which prompted at least one international carrier to temporarily halt service to Erbil. Iran is now threatening a ground invasion should the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) continue to ignore its demands to disarm and intern those groups, something Iraqi Kurdish officials say is impossible for them to do.

Faced with such adversity, Kurdish leaders ought to be closing ranks. Instead, they are at each other’s throats, spinning a web of intrigue that would make Machiavelli blush.

The squabbles have left the region’s estimated five million Kurds ever more disaffected as they struggle to make ends meet, with a steady stream risking their lives to get to Europe through illegal means.

Bestoon Saied, a vendor in Sulaimaniyah’s main bazaar, summed up the feelings aired in multiple street interviews in three cities, telling Al-Monitor, “I don’t believe in any of the parties, none of them. They are all corrupt.”

Tensions took a bloody turn when Hawkar Jaff, a senior intelligence officer, was blown up on Oct. 7 by a bomb planted in his car in Erbil. The murder prompted warnings of a return to the fratricidal war that raged between the region’s two main political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and its weaker rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), in the early 1990s.

“I hope it’s an aberration but I think the crisis could escalate. Hawkar’s killing could be the first domino,” said Bilal Wahab, Nathan and Esther K. Wagner fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

While such fears may sound exaggerated, there is little doubt that the crisis is among the worst and most intractable in recent years. For one, it weakens the Iraqi Kurds vis-a-vis newly appointed Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani's government, with which they are tentatively hopeful of negotiating a new oil and gas law and their share of the Iraqi budget.

 


 


In other news out of Iraq, Baghdad's hosting its annual international book fair.  THE NATIONAL has a photo essay of the event.


The following sites updated:








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