Taking it, as Donald Trump has mused about doing, is not only illegal—it would tear the country apart. On his first full day in office, Donald Trump stood before the CIA’s Memorial Wall, which commemorates the agency’s fallen officers, and railed against the media, boasted about the size of his inauguration-ceremony crowd, and took the opportunity to restate his conviction t
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When Ashti Hawrami, the oil minister from Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdistan region, unfurled a map of untapped oil fields for a team of ExxonMobil officials in the spring of 2011, they saw possibility and profit. The minister pointed to the blocks that had already been taken by other foreign firms as Iraqi Kurdistan, long at odds with the country’s central government over
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Almost a year ago, in February 2016, Lise Grande, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, stated that “we know the Iraqi government has its back against the wall fiscally. In order to stabilize areas and to help displaced families go back, we’ve got to do more.” Since then, however, little effort has been made by Baghdad or its international partners to heed thi
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The campaign against the Islamic State (IS) in Mosul has diverted attention from simmering problems inside the Kurdistan Region of Iraq that will affect post-conflict stabilization. Within the last several months alone, there has been another assassination of a Kurdish journalist, an "honor" killing of a university student, death threats against a female Kurdish parliamentari
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A trip to Baghdad in 2013 offered the Exxon CEO a taste of the complicated Middle East politics he'll have to navigate if he becomes secretary of state. As CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state, had to deal with the antagonism between Iraq's central government and the regional government in the Kurdish north In 2013, Re
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