It’s worth noting that at the same time that Col. (and soon-to-be General) H.R. McMaster was telling an American Enterprise gathering that Iran has been carrying out targeted assassinations of Iraqi officials, three Iranian embassy staff and their Iraqi driver were fired on outside Iran’s Baghdad embassy. Iran blamed the attack, in which two of the employees were seriously wounded, on American security lapses. Setting aside the question of whether or not to broadly engage Iran through direct diplomatic negotiations, the need to engage Iran on the more limited question of Iraq security has already been recognized. So far, the [...]
Amidst the signs of progress in Iraq, two cautionary notes: despite the Maliki government’s solidification of its hold on power by military means, very few of the major political challenges to national reconciliation have been addressed, let alone solved; and the security gains of the past year have now exerted a “push me-pull you” pressure on Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons to return to their homes, which have either been appropriated or walled off behind sectarian lines. In other words, having returned the security situation to what resembles a frozen civil war (or a tenuous and sporadically violated ceasefire), [...]
According to this Jamestown Foundation article by David Romano, Turkey’s recent diplomatic contacts with the Kurdish Regional Government represent a major shift, and is the result of a combination of factors: . . .Turkey’s late February military incursion, which lasted only eight days, did limited damage to the PKK and may have convinced Ankara of the need to pay more attention to a variety of counter-insurgency approaches. At the same time, the incursion probably succeeded in convincing KRG leaders of the need to work harder to both contain the PKK and improve relations with Turkey. To Ankara’s credit, its February [...]
