Iraq

Few people know how ancient the word paradise is, that it has been traced to the Achaemenid dynasty that ruled the Middle East from the 8th century to the 4th century BC over an area that stretched from the Balkans to the Indus River Valley.

Iraqi Kurdistan looked set to unload its first cargo of disputed crude oil in Israel from its new pipeline after weeks of seeking an outlet as Iraq’s central government has threatened legal action against any buyer.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Barack Obama will discuss the situation in Ukraine, Iraq and Syria "in the coming days," a top aide said on Friday.
      
Speaking to reporters, Putin's top foreign policy adviser, Yury Ushakov, did not provide further details about the upcoming phone call.
      

A young woman in Antalya, who faces up to 98 years in prison for participating in last year’s Gezi Park protests, has joined the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), her mother confirmed in a statement to daily Hürriyet on June 20.

GENEVA - More than 50 million people were forcibly uprooted worldwide at the end of last year, the highest level since after World War Two, as people fled crises from Syria to South Sudan, the UN refugee agency said on Friday.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid 'applauded Turkey's move to welcome an independent Kurdistan on its border' during an interview with The Huffington Post on June 19.

Reid reportedly said the U.S. online news outlet that whether the Kurds break away from Iraq and form their own country is a decision that will ultimately have to be made by actors in the region.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became angry because the main opposition leader had called the Middle East a quagmire. “That’s insulting,” the prime minister said. Before a court bans using the words “Middle East” and “quagmire” in the same sentence, this columnist volunteers to call the peaceful, wealthy, healthy and happy region as “the Eden of the Middle East.”

With the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) taking over a very wide geography from the north of Iraq towards its center, we can say that not only within Iraq, but in the entire Middle East, power equilibriums are being disrupted; and as a consequence of this all the alliances in the region will re-shape. This creates several significant outcomes as summarized below:

Iraq is a microcosm in the Middle East.  There is not a single ethnic, sectarian, religious, political or economic group in the Middle East that is not represented in Iraq.  This had been a typical example of the Middle East until modern times.

President Barack Obama pledged to take "precise" military action if needed to check marauding Sunni radicals in Iraq and offered up to 300 US advisors to train Iraqi forces facing a crisis splintering the country on sectarian lines.