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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BAGHDAD — Miad Jubouri, an Iraqi mother of five who joined the ranks of the Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State (IS), has been participating in the battle as part of the Lions of the Tigris faction for the past two years. In a patriotic and conservative Iraqi society, Jubouri’s fight alongside the male-dominated Iraqi security forces has caught the attention of both the com
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ERBIL, Iraq — Exxon Mobil has pulled out of three of the six exploration blocks it operated in the Kurdistan Region. The American oil giant withdrew from Betwata, Arbat and Qara Hanjeer in Sulaimaniyah province, raising many questions about the sudden step. Hemen Hawrami, the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party's foreign relations office, announced during a Dec. 26 press
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Download PDF: economics-books-in-2017-by-the-enlightened-economist Here is my annual round up of titles that look interesting from the various spring catalogues (I’ve noted a few of these in separate posts before but it’s always handy to gather them together). There are quite a few enticing titles in the Princeton University Press one (my own publisher). Cass Sunstein has&n
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According to a UN report, the global improvement in living standards has passed much of the Arab world by. Robert Fisk explains why Why is the Arab world – let us speak with terrible sharpness – so backward? Why so many dictators, so few human rights, so much state security and torture, so terrible a literacy rate? Why does this wretched place, so rich in oil, have to
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