June 27, 2007 | By KIRK SEMPLE

ERBIL, Iraq - "It is a measure of soaring Kurdish optimism that government officials here talk seriously about one day challenging Dubai as the Middle East’s main transportation and business hub.


  

By Jim Muir
BBC correspondent in northern Iraq

In a mountain hamlet so small and remote that it does not even have a name, Aisha was drawing water from the outside standpipe which supplies her family of eight and her neighbours in the cluster of mud-brick houses.

The spectacular ranges which crowd the horizon were mantled in snow.

"Of course we'll all be voting in the elections," she said.

  


April 30, 2007  | By Guy Dinmore in Washington

Before its latest political crisis erupted, Turkey had been pondering a military incursion into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish rebel bases just beyond its border. But the US has begun warning Ankara to learn a lesson from what some officials in Washington are starting to call Israel's "strategic defeat" in Lebanon under similar circumstances last summer.


  

BAGHDAD, Aug 7 (AFP) - 4h14 - Iraq's leaders will attempt to break the deadlock on a new draft constitution in a national conference here Sunday amid signs that Iraq's Kurds are unwilling to compromise on their demands for autonomy.

  


Tuesday, October 23, 2007

An invasion of northern Iraq would benefit no one but Kurdish extremists.


  


27 November 2006

A Kurd has testified how he survived a firing squad by Iraqi forces at the resumption of Saddam Hussein's genocide trial in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

  

STRASBOURG, Sept 27 (AFP) - 20h15 - The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday ordered Turkey to pay damages to a Turkish journalist for repressing her freedom of speech in a case where she was accused of writing Kurdish separatist propaganda.


  


March 3, 2008

London, Asharq Al-Awsat - Asharq Al-Awsat was suprised by an attempt Thursday by Muhammad Habash, the head of the Syrian-Iranian committee and a member of Syrian parliament, to deny comments that he had made to Asharq Al-Awsat Wednesday, in which he said that Iran has been building listening stations in Syria.


  

FRIDAY, MAY 12, 2006 -
AMMAN, Jordan

He has a disconcerting facial tic and opens his cellphone with an odd jerk of the left wrist, as if barely controlling his muscles. Yet he is vigorous, razor sharp and articulate, and holds a commanding presence.

  


March 26, 2008 | Istanbul | By MUSTAFA AKYOL

Who would you expect to be zealous enemies of "moderate Islam"? Islamic fundamentalists? You bet. From Osama bin Laden & Co. to less violent but equally fanatic groups, Islamist militants abhor their co-religionists who reject tyranny and violence in the name of God. But they are not alone. In this part of the world, there is another group that holds a totally opposite worldview but shares a similar hatred of moderate Islam: Turkey's secular fundamentalists.