Adel Abdul Mahdi showed himself to be a good analyst of the country’s problems. But his cabinet choices show he may not have the solutions. In an essay he wrote on his Facebook page five months ago, Adel Abdul Mahdi said he wouldn’t want to be Iraq’s next prime minister. The country’s toxic political culture would make it impossible to govern, he claimed. “
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Baghdad — Iraq's appointment of two policy veterans as its new oil and electricity ministers could herald an era of urgent oil capacity growth, as OPEC's number two producer pumps at record highs, targets higher exports, plans to restart the national oil company and pushes long-delayed efforts to capture more gas. Prime Minister-designate Adel Abdul-Mahdi named part
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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Internal reform and a pragmatic approach to relations with Baghdad are among the top recommendations from a British delegation published on Thursday following a fact-finding mission to the Region and the federal capital in May. "The Kurdistan Region in Iraq has taken two steps forward and one step back in recent years, but has survived and could thr
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After more than 15 years of American military entanglement in Iraq, the sense of idealism that characterized the original U.S. intervention has long since dissipated. Rather than dreaming of midwifing a model democracy in Baghdad, Washington’s aims there have become more modest and realist: preventing a resurgence of the Islamic State and balancing Iranian power. So it is iron
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When the Iraqi autonomous region of Kurdistan went looking for someone brave enough to pump billions of dollars into developing its large oil and gas reserves, it found a man who has never been accused of lacking courage: Igor Sechin, an old friend of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The chief executive of Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, has ignored fears of conf
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