PM Abadi's draft budget seeks to balance the competing interests of a fractured polity while contending with a devastating drop in oil prices and a crippling legacy of fiscal mismanagement ERBIL - Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's Cabinet is trying to pull off a difficult balancing act – attempting to fund a war, reconstruct a country, and corral a fractured body politic, despi
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The cooperative oil export and revenue-sharing deal reached by leaders in Baghdad and Erbil on Dec. 2 has been promoted as the last chance to end a decade of acrimony over oil policy. The Cabinet has now embedded its terms into the 2015 draft budget law, which is now being considered by Parliament. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is slated to contribute 250,00
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Iraq's Cabinet balanced a collapse in oil revenue while maintaining spending commitments needed to placate key constituents and keep up the fight against the so-called Islamic State (IS) militant group in a draft budget for 2015 that it approved Tuesday. The budget calls for spending of around 123 trillion Iraqi dinars (about $102.5 billion), said Abdul Qadir Omar, a member of
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Key Takeaway: No significant attacks occurred on December 13 against pilgrims during the culmination of Arbaeen. ISIS has historically targeted Arbaeen while millions of mostly Shi'a pilgrims descend on the city of Karbala. The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) with the likely support of the Iraqi Shi'a militias within the Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs) applied heightened secu
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BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq is seeking to postpone a final $4.6 billion installment of reparations for its 1990-91 occupation of Kuwait, Finance Minister Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters, as it faces a cash crisis caused by falling oil prices and war with Islamic State. Since Iraq was first allowed to resume oil sales nearly two decades ago it has paid funds into a United Nations body
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