Newyorktimes.com | Opinion By PETER W. GALBRAITH - OCT. 6, 2017 (*)

PARIS — Jalal Talabani, the former Iraqi president who died on Tuesday, was an outsize figure in Middle East politics. A fierce Kurdish nationalist, he was the first democratically elected head of state in a land with a history going back to the dawn of civilization. Kurds will remember him as a giant of their national struggle.

Nytimes.com - By ROD NORDLAND

DIBIS, Iraq — The prisoners were taken to a waiting room in groups of four, and were told to stand facing the concrete wall, their noses almost touching it, their hands bound behind their backs.

Newyorktimes.com

Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader who used pragmatism, guile and an outsize personality to navigate a hazardous course in Mideast politics, surviving guerrilla war, the terrors of Saddam Hussein and shifting alliances to become the first president of Iraq under its postwar Constitution, died on Tuesday in Berlin. He was 83.

Lefigaro - by Thierry Oberlé

The president of the Kurdish Institute of Paris urges France to accompany the march of Iraqi Kurdistan towards independence.

We are deeply saddened by the loss of Jalal Talabani on Tuesday 3 October in Berlin at the age of 83.

Al-monitor.com - Jack Detsch *

The US government has stopped paying Kurdish peshmerga fighters’ salaries after a yearlong agreement expired over the summer, and there are no current plans to renew it.

Huffingtonpost.com - By David L. Phillips

Nearly 93 percent of Iraqi Kurds voted for independence in the referendum on September 25. Now Washington faces a choice. The U.S. can either support the Iraqi Kurds who are staunch allies. Or it can back Iraq, a sectarian theocratic state acting as a proxy for Iran.

Nytimes.com - By ROD NORDLAND and DAVID ZUCCHINO

ERBIL, Iraq — The world could be excused for thinking that another war was about to break out in Iraq.

Newsweek.com

On September 25, Iraqi Kurdistan held an independence referendum not only in its recognized territory, but also in ethnically-mixed areas of Iraq to which both it and the Iraqi government have laid claims.