| SLATE
Monday, June 4, 2007 | By Christopher Hitchens
A question every American politician needs to address.

I chanced last week to run into a senior staff member of UNAMI, which is the little-known (and somehow not very reassuring) acronym for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq. You could read acres of news from that country as it undergoes everything that the death squads of the parties of God can inflict on a society, without ever being reminded that coalition forces are applying a U.N. mandate for the reconstruction and democratization of Iraq. The assaults by the Baathists and the Bin Ladenists on the U.N. presence have been especially vicious: The U.N. headquarters in Baghdad were utterly demolished by military-grade explosives three years ago, murdering among others the heroic Sergio Vieira de Mello, a senior U.N. peacemaker who was explicitly targeted by the Islamists for his role in overseeing the independence of "Christian" East Timor from "Muslim" Indonesia.

BAGHDAD: Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq predicted in a televised interview that former President Saddam Hussein would be hanged by the end of the year.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007 | MUSTAFA AKYOL | DİYARBAKIR

This town has always been the most prominent city in Turkey's southeast. In Ottoman times, in fact the whole region was called the “Diyarbekir province.” Today, with its 1.2 million inhabitants, it is not only the most populous of the southeastern towns, but also the most developed one.

July 29, 2007 | By AYUB NURI

I was born in 1979 in the northern Iraqi town of Halabja. In Kurdish, Halabja means “the wrong place,” and that is how the town felt when I was growing up, because I never knew a life without war. My father worked in Halabja’s electricity office, and we farmed for a few months every year.

By Robert F. Worth The New York Times

THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 2006

SULAIMANIYA, Iraq Like most young Kurds in this northern city, Asad Ali does not speak Arabic. He has heard about the rising wave of sectarian killings down in Baghdad, but it seems a world away from the quiet rhythms of daily life here in Kurdistan.

ANKARA, Sept 13 (AFP) - 13h05 - A man suspected of plotting to kill Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was described in the press Tuesday as a mentally unstable nationalist dissatisfied with Ankara's response to a rekindled Kurdish rebellion in the country's southeast.

October 15, 2007 | Hasmik Hovhannisyan

Approximately 40 million Kurds live in the world; about 20 million live in Turkey, 9 million in Iran, 6 million in Iraq, 3 million in Syria. And the rest are scattered all over the world. Almost any European country has a Kurdish Diaspora; the largest community is 1 million people and is registered in Germany.

30 July 2007

A conversation with Australian lawyer Jonathan Morrow - an adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government - about the growing success and safety of Iraqi Kurdistan. While many Iraqi Arabs view Kurdistan as a safe haven, its democratic success also generates suspicion and resentment from its neighbours.

Sunday, June 17, 2007 | By Joshua Partlow

IRBIL, Iraq - Iraqi border police believe neighboring Turkey has amassed 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers along its southern border with Iraq. Turkish helicopters have flown into Iraqi airspace to conduct missions against Kurdish rebels in the mountainous region, and Turkish mortar shells regularly crash down on Iraqi soil, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials