Kurds Away

As my 2 1/2 long time readers know, for many years I maintained a blog called Today in Iraq and Afghanistan (originally Today in Iraq). During the height of U.S. involvement in Iraq we had thousands of visitors every day, and we were listed in the blogroll at Eschaton and other prominent sites. But Americans lost interest in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and even the fight against the Islamic State didn ' t garner much attention. I finally stopped blogging there a few months ago when the situation in both countries had turned into stagnation and the daily routine of generally low-level violence just didn ' t seem worth documenting.Anyway, the result is that I know quite a lot about the situation that, rather astonishingly, has finally gotten some congressional Republicans to speak against their Dear Leader. It ' s more complicated than I can fully explain in this space, but I ' ll give the basics. The Kurds are an ethnic group that got largely screwed when the European powers carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I. They wound up divided among Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey. The history of the Kurds in Iraq is very complicated but the upshot is that over the years they achieved a degree of self-rule but during the Iran-Iraq war Saddam Hussein adopted highly repressive policies toward Iraqi Kurdistan and perpetrated the notoriousAnfal genocide. Following the fall of Saddam, the Kurds gained an autonomous regional government (the KRG) in federation with Iraq.An militant...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs