ISIS is on the decline, but the catastrophic political divisions in Iraq and Syria that gave rise to it are no closer to being mended.
The Fall of the House of ISIS
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Iraqi Kurdistan
Europe and the Middle East Are Both on the Verge of Unraveling
From Catalonia to Kurdistan, long simmering regions are clamoring for their own states. But what good is being a state anymore?
Behind Washington’s ‘Crackpot’ Deal with Turkey to Fight ISIS
Under the guise of fighting ISIS, Turkey’s president is re-igniting a bloody war with the Kurds for his own political purposes.
The Kurdish Elephant
In their latest deal to fight ISIS, Washington and Turkey are treating the Middle East’s largest stateless minority like pawns. That’s a huge mistake.
Here’s Everything Wrong with the White House’s War on the Islamic State
The Obama administration’s war plans in Iraq and Syria are illegal, ill-conceived, and destined to fail. Here’s what the U.S.—and you—can do instead.
America Should Open Its Doors to Iraqis
Iraq’s dire refugee crisis is posing a humanitarian and political challenge to the Obama administration.
Iraq Elections: No End to Violence
Iraq’s latest elections were relatively free and fair, but they won’t do much to resolve the country’s stark sectarian divides.
In Kurdish Syria, a Different War
On August 15, a car bomb ripped through a Beirut suburb, killing 21 people. The explosion was but the latest in a wave of attacks across Lebanon throughout 2012 and 2013 that were linked to events inside Syria. The ease with which violence in Iraq and Syria has...
The Kurdish Moment: Opportunity and Peril
For almost a century, the Kurds—one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without its own state—have been deceived and double-crossed, their language and culture suppressed, their villages burned and bombed, and their people scattered. But because of the U.S. invasion...
Kurdistan: The Next Autocracy?
Kurdistan has enjoyed an unprecedented level of political and economic stability since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Yet not all is well in Kurdistan, due in part to the dominant presence of one ruling family. Descended from a political dynasty that has built a power base over centuries of fighting, regional president Massoud Barzani has blossomed into an authoritarian ruler not unlike many whose regimes are now crumbling from the internal pressures of the Arab Spring.