ARBIL - Growing confrontation between Iraqi Kurds and neighboring Turkey presents a new threat to a fragile calm in the north. Tensions have run high between Iraqi Kurds and Turkey since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, but they were further exacerbated last...

ARBIL - Academic life in Iraq's volatile southern and central regions has become increasingly paralyzed, with hundreds of students and professors targeted and many more abandoning their educational institutions in search of a refuge. Raad Yaseen, 25, fled Baghdad's...

IRBIL - Iraqis have left a bloody 2006 behind, but the two opening weeks of 2007 do not bode well for the rest of this year. As the United Nations reported a death toll of 34,000 civilians for last year, the non-government organization Iraq Body Count suggested that...

ARBIL - After an estimated 10 percent of active journalists in Iraq died in 2006, the rest are asking themselves what lies ahead for them in the New Year. A report released by the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RWB, also known as Reporters sans Frontieres), on...

ARBIL - Khanzad, 26, originally Kurdish, returned to Arbil with her family in mid-2004 after 16 years of living in Baghdad. Like many coming from the violence-stricken city, she has a harrowing story to tell. A number of armed robbers broke into their house on a sunny...

ARBIL - Iraq's national reconciliation conference held over the weekend highlights the gap between the country's various political groups and their lack of consensus on a common basis for reconciliation. Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's call for the return of...

ARBIL - In a strongly worded statement, the president of Iraq's northern Kurdistan region rejected in its entirety the report by the Iraq Study Group, and threatened that Kurds would opt for secession from Iraq should Washington try to implement some of the key...

ARBIL - The call from his mother changed Dr. Harb Zakko's life. "Someone has been calling me to open the door, saying he has something for you," his mother said. Soon after, apparently the same person called him at his clinic, asking personal questions. The...

ARBIL - As Saddam Hussein faces his second trial, this one over the killing of an estimated 180,000 Kurds in the late 1980s, people in Kurdistan are taking a particular interest whether the death sentence in the first case will be carried out before there can be a...

ARBIL - Through a steadily worsening security situation and deepening political divisions, a dispute is now erupting between Kurdish leaders and the Baghdad regime over access to oil resources. Kurdish authorities and the federal government in Baghdad have exchanged...