Politics of Iraq

The Iraqi parliament elected the candidate of a pro-Iran list as speaker on Sept.15, paving the way for the formation of a government more than four months after legislative polls. 

Dear Members of the European Parliament,

I was on a mission to write a reportage in Mosul, the Islamic State group's former capital in northern Iraq, about children returning to a school shut down for three years by the jihadists. I was thinking of how best to describe the joy of those children as they returned to their long-forbidden desks in that ruined city.

Gunmen entered the governorate building in Erbil, the seat of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq on Monday and began firing from windows at Kurdish security forces, a deputy governor of the city and Kurdish security officials said.

An Iraqi security agency has admitted holding hundreds of “terrorism” suspects for months, Human Rights Watch said on July 22 while calling on authorities to inform the families of those held.

Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani on July 2 called President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to congratulate him and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for the election victory. 

Prime Minister of Iraq's Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) Nechirvan Barzani on June 26 congratulated Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on his election win, expressing the desire to improve ties.

"We congratulate you, your party...," Barzani said, in a message he sent to Erdoğan, state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

30 foreigners were detained in Turkey in an operation against the Islamic State organization, the BNR reported. Intelligence Councils and the Counter-Terrorism Task Force in Istanbul have carried out a simultaneous operation of 12 addresses in 7 districts. The operation was done at night, but it was reported this afternoon. Searches of documents and electronic materials have been seized.

The Sulaymaniyah-based Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) vowed on May 29 to lodge a legal appeal against a parliamentary decision to cancel all ballots cast overseas in Iraq's May 12 parliamentary election.

Iraq's Muqtada al-Sadr, the maverick Shiite cleric whose political coalition beat out Iran's favored candidates to come in first in national elections, says he wants to form a government that puts Iraqis first.

An alliance headed by nationalist cleric Moqtada Sadr and a rival bloc of pro-Iranian former fighters appeared to surge on May 14 in surprise preliminary results from Iraq's first poll since the defeat of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).