Al-monitor.com | Mustafa al-Kadhimi

Kurdistan Region of Iraq President Massoud Barzani's visit to Baghdad on July 7 carries many connotations. It also reflects an Iraqi environment favorable to dialogue, not only to resolve the problems between Erbil and Baghdad, but also to address the ongoing Iraqi crises at various levels.

Rudaw.com

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – For the past decade Kirkuk has remained one of Iraq’s deadliest cities, but its governor says that since his election two years ago much has changed, including better security, more jobs and longer hours of electricity.

Nytimes.com | Opinion | By KANAN MAKIYA | Published: April 6, 2013

ON April 9, 2003, Baghdad fell to an American-led coalition. The removal of Saddam Hussein and the toppling of a whole succession of other Arab dictators in 2011 were closely connected — a fact that has been overlooked largely because of the hostility that the Iraq war engendered.

Time.com | By Jay Newton-Small / Dohuk, Iraq

Time.com

If there is one man who deserves the credit for the growing Turkish-Kurd rapprochement, it’s Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani of Iraqi Kurdistan. Five years ago Kurds and foreigners alike laughed in his face when he told them that not only did he want Iraqi Kurdistan to export its own oil, but that he wanted to export it to Turkey, which has had an intractable problem with its own large Kurdish minority. Barzani’s strategy was one of patience: starting with confidence-building with the Turks and then coaxing small oil companies and then larger ones to risk Baghdad’s ire to drill for oil not only in the autonomous region but in territory disputed by both Barzani’s government and the Iraqi central government.

Bbc.co.uk

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has suffered a stroke and is being treated in hospital, media and officials say.

Bbc.co.uk

Hundreds of Kurdish prisoners in Turkey have ended a 68-day hunger strike after jailed ex-rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan urged them to do so.

Economist.com

The political aftershocks of a killing of Kurds still reverberate

TURKEY’S treatment of the Kurds has a grim new symbol. On December 28th Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish smugglers crossing into Turkey from Iraq, killing 34. Most were teenagers; the youngest was 12. All came from a pair of villages in the mainly Kurdish township of Uludere. Their families had trouble separating the remains from mules who died. “We pieced them together the best we could and buried them,” says Abdurrahman Yurek, who lost his 16-year-old son.

(Reuters) - Kurdish parliamentarian Leyla Zana, a former Nobel Peace Prize nominee, was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a Turkish court on Thursday for spreading militant propaganda in a series of speeches she made over four years ago, court officials said.

nybooks.com | Charles Glass

Archaeologists believe that human beings settled on the hilltop that became Aleppo—some 225 miles north of Damascus—around eight thousand years ago. Cuneiform tablets from the third millennium BC record the construction of a temple to a chariot-riding storm god, usually called Hadad; while mid-second-millennium Hittite archives point to the settlement’s growing political and economic power. Its Arabic name, Haleb, is said to derive from Haleb Ibrahim, Milk of Abraham, for the sheep’s milk the biblical patriarch offered to travelers in Aleppo’s environs.