Tehran Upping the Ante, Training Taliban Fighters in Iran

With the Trump administration pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and looking to impose new sanctions which will hurt Tehran’s ability to finance terrorism around the world, Iran is looking to increase their influence everywhere in the Middle East and they’re playing both sides by training some of the Taliban’s best fighters inside Iran. […]

KRG Prime Minister discusses Kurdistan’s future with Senator Lindsey Graham

This week, Kurdistan Regional Government Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani met with United States Senator Lindsey Graham to discuss the many issues Kurdistan is currently facing. The two spoke in Erbil primarily about the continued efforts by the Peshmerga to subdue the Islamic State and the nearly 2 billion internally displaced people that have been affected […]

China’s Military Suffering From “Peace Disease” With No War Experience

A Chinese military newspaper was subtly rattling a saber when it said that the PLA is suffering from “peace disease” after nearly four decades without war. The People’s Liberation Army Daily wrote, “Peace disease has been a common symptom in our military for decades.” The Chinese PLA hasn’t had any combat experience since a brief […]

Kurdistan gears up for election season with an all new electoral registration staff

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has appointed 1,500 new employees to oversee voter registration for their parliamentary elections in September. Another 50,000 will be brought on under contract as well by the Kurdish electoral commission. When Iraq held its may parliamentary elections, widespread accusations of fraudulent voting practices were echoed throughout Kurdistan by several political […]

Iraqi Judge orders manual recount of parliamentary election votes

A panel of judges that were appointed by Iraq’s Supreme Court have ruled that the votes from the May parliamentary election will be recounted manually by appointees. However, the votes will only be recounted at locations where political parties filed formal complaints. The recount will start in Kirkuk this week. A statement released by the […]

Long Overdue- USMA Gets First Black Superintendent in 216-Year History

One hundred and forty-one years after the Corps of Cadets got its first black graduate and 86 years since it had its first graduate in the 20th century, West Point, the United States Military Academy (USMA), is finally receiving its first African-American Commandant of Cadets. To say that seeing that was a surprise is an […]

Calls To Boost Military Budget Adding to Growing Unease in UK

The United States and Great Britain have been staunch allies thru World War I, World War II, the Korean conflict as well as in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and in Syria. But the lack of spending in the British military has some fearing that the UK’s military prowess will be looked upon as irrelevant unless […]

Netherlands continues foreign aid efforts in the Middle East

The Netherlands Foreign Trade Minister, Sigrid Kaag, recently visited Kurdistan, Iraq and Jordan in a move to push rehabilitation efforts in the wake of Islamic State conflict. Primarily they will be focusing on the city of Mosul, further Peshmerga military advisory work and other humanitarian aid programs. Kaag addressed Netherlands press stating that, “It is of […]

Kurdistan has begun regulating water for conservation efforts

The Iraqi-Kurdistan city of Sulaymaniah has begun mandating the installation of meters that will record the use of water consumption in an effort to reduce waste. The director of water resources for the city, Sarbast Osman, reported that, “On Sunday, we will start installing water meters to record water consumption of households in Sulaymaniah. The […]

Drug use is on the rise in Kurdistan

Kurdistan Regional Government officials alongside various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are now claiming that Kurdistan and Iraq are in the middle of an illegal drug crisis. The number of citizens addicted to illicit substances has risen dramatically recently, authorities say this is due to several reasons. The leader of the Organization for Countering Drugs, Ibrahim Ramadhan, […]

Trump’s VA Nominee Wilkie A Polarizing Figure, Will He Work For All Vets?

President Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, Robert Wilkie is a very qualified, conservative Washington insider, who has over three decades of experience navigating the minefields of D.C. politics. And he has a tough job to do manning one of the nation’s largest bureaucracies that is always under the microscope. Wilkie is […]