Iraq

Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani announced his resignation Sunday after the biggest gamble of his 12 years as president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) not only failed, but utterly backfired as territorial reversals reduced KRG power to its weakest position in decades. Though his push for an independence referendum had overwhelming support among Iraq's Kurds, and with even the encouragement of some external allies, the decisive military response by the Iraqi national government resulted in rapid forced handover of Kurdish-held oil rich areas and a return to pr

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

“The Kurds have no friends but the mountains,” is an old lament. Last week, it must have been very much on Kurdish minds.

As their U.S. allies watched, the Kurdish peshmerga fighters were run out of Kirkuk and all the territory they had captured fighting ISIS alongside the Americans. The Iraqi army that ran them out was trained and armed by the United States.

One day after Rex Tillerson's visit to Saudi Arabia, which came as part of the US Secretary of State's concerted efforts to curb Iran's rapidly expanding influence in the region, including boosting the clout of Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia in Shiite-majority Iraq, and urging Iranian militias to leave Iraq as the "fighting against ISIS comes to an end", Tillerson made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan's capital Kabul, where he is in discussions with President Ashraf Ghani about the United States’ policy towards South Asia.

Submitted by Elijah Magnier, Middle East based chief international war correspondent for Al Rai Media

In a dramatic de-escalation of recent hostilities in Iraqi Kurdistan, where in a blitz campaign the Iraqi army was able to recapture Kirkuk , effectively regaining control of the oil-rich region, the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, i.e. the army of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan told Sky News Arabia that it has agreed to return to the 2003 Iraq border, which if confirmed would be a major concession to Iraq which has been pushing for just this conclusion for the past month.