Iraq

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

Iraqi forces continue to advance on al-Qaem, the last "Islamic State" (ISIS) stronghold in Iraq, which will put the last stone over the terrorist group’s grave and on the so-called “Islamic State Caliphate” that so much occupied the world’s headlines over the last few years and indeed, large parts of Iraqi and Syrian territories.

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