Free Republic

"The Kurds have no friends but the mountains," is an old lament. Last week, it must have been very much on Kurdish minds. As their U.S. allies watched, the Kurdish peshmerga fighters were run out of Kirkuk and all the territory they had captured fighting ISIS alongside the Americans. The Iraqi army that ran them out was trained and armed by the United States. The U.S. had warned the Kurds against holding the referendum on independence on Sept. 25, which carried with 92 percent. Iran and Turkey had warned against an independent Kurdistan that could be a magnet for Kurdish...

It's been three years since President Obama called the Islamic State, a terrorist organization that emerged in the Iraq power vacuum left behind after his pre-mature troop pullout in 2011, the "jayvee team." During his remaining time in the Oval Office between 2014 and 2016, Americans and the world watched as ISIS marched across Iraq undeterred, brutally slaughtering thousands and destroying world history along the way. What had been won by U.S. forces in preceding years was lost. By 2016, ISIS had taken over and controlled large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, declaring the coveted caliphate so many Islamic...

A top UK official told the BBC last week that ISIS terrorists from the UK returning from Syria and Iraq will not be prosecuted. Instead, the government will try to reintegrate them back into society because they were "naive" when they joined the genocidal terrorist group.This came just two days after the chief of the UK's MI5 spy service gave a rare speech warning that the terrorism threat was higher than he had ever seen.Maybe, just maybe, these two statements are related.Just yesterday, one government minister suggested that the best way to deal with returning ISIS terrorists would be...

On October 20, Iraqi Security Forces battled Kurdish Peshmerga near the town of Altun Kupri. The Iraqi forces cradled U.S.-made M-16s and rode on black-coated American Humvees. The Peshmerga, defending a berm near the town, were also shown on video using U.S.-made Humvees, painted olive green. If there is a symbol of U.S. policy gone awry it is that these two partners in the coalition that has so successfully fought ISIS are now turning their guns on each other. Most troubling is the presence of Iranian-backed Shia militias called Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs) among the Iraqi fighters. Since the fall...

Not much more than a month ago, Iraqi Kurdistan's leaders seemed sure that their path to independence was all but guaranteed. The autonomous region controlled swathes of disputed territory once administered by the federal government in Baghdad, including vast oil reserves and energy infrastructure. Its armed forces, known as Peshmerga, enjoyed a formidable reputation and had cooperated closely with the US and other powerful allies in the fight against Islamic State. The way, they thought, was clear. returned to Baghdad. It was a rout that blindsided many of Iraq’s Kurds and left their long held dream of secession in tatters....

Paris is under a curfew for the first time since 1944. Think about that. Not since World War II and the Nazi occupation has the City of Lights been under a curfew and martial law. A state of emergency exists across France. The borders have been closed. The French Army is on the streets of Paris. The police now have the authority to raid homes and conduct searches with no legal precedent, other than the fact that the country is under a state of emergency. Paris is a war zone tonight. Broken, bullet-ridden and blown up pieces of glass, furniture...

German federal prosecutors have opened up more than 900 terrorism-related cases so far this year, including 800 related to radical Islamists, according to a report published in the German language newspaper Welt am Sonntag on Sunday. The number of terrorism cases has jumped nearly four-fold compared to last year, when federal prosecutors opened about 250 proceedings. In 2013, there were about 80 terrorism cases in the courts. The sharp rise has stretched manpower at the Karlsruhe-based federal prosecutors office, the newspaper reported. Nearly 300 terrorism cases have been transferred from federal authorities to state prosecutors. […] Not all of the...

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Sunday it's time for Iranian "foreign fighters" to leave Iraq, now that Islamic State militants are nearing defeat. "Iranian militias that are in Iraq, now that the fight against Daesh and ISIS is coming to a close, those militias need to go home," Tillerson said during a press conference in Saudi Arabia. "The foreign fighters in Iraq need to go home and allow the Iraqi people to regain control," the former CEO of Exxon Mobile said. Tillerson was in Saudi Arabia to attend a launch meeting of the Saudi Arabia-Iraq Coordination Committee. The Saudis...

The U.S. military must figure out how to keep Iraq from breaking apart while also preventing neighboring Iran from turning Iraq into a proxy state.. It makes no sense for a nation to treat its enemies kindly and its allies harshly. Any nation that tries this foolish approach will see its enemies grow stronger and more dangerous, and will lose its allies when it abandons them. ... The man most responsible for the failure of the U.S. to give adequate support to the Kurds is Brett McGurk, President Trump’s special envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS. He held...

Kurdish authorities estimate that 100,000 people have fled Kirkuk, Iraq, this week, formerly under control of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) but now lost to the Baghdad government and its Iran-backed Shiite militia allies. Kurds fleeing Kirkuk—a multi-ethnic city heavily reliant on its vast oil resources—say Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) fighters are looting, burning houses down, and attacking Kurdish citizens. The Iraqi government announced a military initiative to wrest Kirkuk out of KRG authority after September 25, when the KRG organized a non-binding referendum asking Kurds whether they would support the establishment of an independent Kurdistan. While Kirkuk has not...

The United States is concerned by reports of violent clashes around the town of Altun Kupri in northern Iraq. We are monitoring the situation closely, and call on all parties to cease all violence and provocative movements, and to coordinate their activities to restore calm. In order to avoid any misunderstandings or further clashes, we urge the central government to calm the situation by limiting federal forces’ movements in disputed areas to only those coordinated with the Kurdistan Regional Government. We are encouraged by Prime Minister Abadi’s instructions to federal forces to protect Iraqi Kurdish citizens and to not provoke...

Well, we’ve done it. We’ve given Kirkuk to the Iranians. Kirkuk. The Heart of Kurdistan. It’s the Jerusalem of the Kurds, our only trusted and loyal allies in Iraq. It’s also the last piece of terrain needed by Tehran to complete its overland, unimpeded access to the shores of the Mediterranean and to its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon. And it’s precisely where President Trump’s new hard line on Iran, barely 72 hours old, was put to the test and failed. Actually, it didn’t fail. Our State Department failed it. Rather than act to dissuade or disrupt this past weekend’s bold...

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the Turkish border may soon be closed to the Kurdistan Region on the condition that Baghdad continues to provide the needs of the Region.  “Our talks [with Iraq] on what we can do are continuing. If they [the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government] hand over the border gate to the central government, we’ll set the condition [that the central government] must meet all the needs of the people under the northern Iraqi administration,” Erdogan told reporters late Tuesday night during a return trip from Poland. “We have not yet closed...

ANF and Roj News reporters Ersin Caksu and Sores Benek wrote about what happened in Kirkuk yesterday. During the invasion maneuvers of the Iraqi army and the Hashd al-Shabi on Kirkuk, the defense line formed by the guerrillas, the peshmergas who refused to withdraw and the people of Kirkuk who took up arms in the Feylaq Crossing was broken when KDP forces abandoned the general security forces buildings and withdrew from the area along with their heavy weaponry. Following the attacks the Iraqi army and the Hashd al-Shaabi forces with them launched on Kirkuk, the defense line formed by the...

If President Trump wants to stop Iran from making the entire country of Iraq a subsidiary of the Revolutionary Guard, he’ll need to intervene in the burgeoning crisis in Kurdistan — and fast. On Monday, Iraqi forces trounced Kurdish fighters and emerged victorious in a short fight for control of the oil-rich northern Iraqi town of Kirkuk. And they couldn’t have done it without us. When ISIS stormed Iraq in 2014, the demoralized Iraqi army collapsed, its troops deserted and fled. Baghdad was utterly humiliated. Then Kurdish fighters, known as Peshmerga, entered Kirkuk, secured the key city and kept it...

Iraqi forces took control of the two largest oil fields in the disputed northern province of Kirkuk on Tuesday demolishing Kurdish hopes of creating a viable independent state. The Kurds withdrew without a fight after federal government troops and militia entered the city of Kirkuk and seized the provincial governor's office and key military bases in response to a Kurdish vote for independence last month. The fields accounted for around 250,000 barrels per day of the 650,000 bpd that the autonomous Kurdish region exported under its own auspices and their loss deals a huge blow to its already parlous finances...

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton spoke to Breitbart News Daily Sirius XM host Alex Marlow Monday, coming out strongly in support of Iraqi Kurdistan in its bid for independence and criticizing American ties to the Iraqi national government, which he described as “dominated by Iran.” “I support independence for the Kurds in Iraq. It’s no surprise the State Department opposes that. I think the State Department and the Pentagon are still operating under the assumption you can put Iraq back together again, and you can’t,” Bolton told Marlow. Bolton condemned America’s putative ally in Baghdad as...

Hours after moving to reclaim control of the northern city of Kirkuk, Iraqi government forces said Monday that they had reached the outskirts of the city, seizing oil fields and other important sites from Kurdish forces that had held the territory since 2014. The quick advance pitted one American-trained military force against another. Iraqi government troops and the Kurdish forces, known as pesh merga, are both part of the American-led coalition battling the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

KIRKUK, Iraq (AP) - The Latest on Iraq, where federal forces have attacked the Kurdish-held city of Kirkuk (all times local): 2:30 p.m. A spokesman for Iraq's state-sanctioned militias says they have "achieved all our goals" in retaking areas from Kurdish forces in and around the disputed northern city of Kirkuk. Ahmed al-Assadi says federal forces came under fire from "some rebels" after launching the operation early Monday and returned fire. He says federal forces have been deployed in the area of the K-1 military base, the Kirkuk airport and a number of oil fields and installations. But he says...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi forces began moving at midnight on Sunday towards oil fields and an important air base held by Kurdish forces near the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, Iraqi and Kurdish officials said.