Author: Kwestan Rezan

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Eight volunteers have temporarily opened a restaurant on the Sulaimani-Kirkuk highway near the town of Chamchamal, providing free food at dusk for those who break their fasts. “We are a group of seven to eight volunteers. Three to four of us cook rice. We usually come in at 2pm. The food is usually ready at around 5pm,” Sardar Abdulkarim, a volunteer cook told Rudaw’s Peshawa Bakhtyar on Sunday. Abdulkarim went on to detail that they “cook 25 kilograms of beans, 75 kilograms of rice, some days 50 kilograms, in addition to 100-150 kilograms of chicken on…

(9/3 – 125) Kazakhstan is gearing up for snap elections of the lower house of parliament on March 19, and there is a sense of anticipation in the air. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who came to power in 2019, called for snap elections in the wake of the deadly street protests in January 2022. The elections are part of the president’s ambitious reform agenda, Jana Kazakhstan (New Kazakhstan), which aims to usher in a new era of political liberalization. The parliamentary elections are stage two of Tokayev’s program, following his re-election winning 80 percent of the votes last November. The coming…

The visit of the White House coordinator for Middle East and North Africa affairs, Brett McGurk, to Iraq’s Kurdistan region has not stopped the mounting escalation between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The widening chasm between the two main parties in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq raises fears of an armed showdown, as no party is showing itself willing to make any concessions. According to Kurdish officials, the Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union maintain two military units whose numbers range between 100,000 and 120,000. American and European efforts have failed…

Turkey on Tuesday denounced as “absurd” a decision by a Swedish prosecutor not to open an investigation into a protest by Kurds in central Stockholm where an effigy of the Turkish president was hung from a lamppost. Last week’s protest outside Stockholm City Hall drew an angry backlash from Turkey, a NATO member which has been holding off on approving Sweden’s application to join the military alliance until the Swedish government cracks down on groups that Ankara regards as security threats. Turkey summoned the Swedish ambassador and canceled a visit by the speaker of the Swedish parliament in reaction to…

The lawmaker, Ahmad Hossein Fallahi, pointed to Iraq’s decision to deploy 6,000 troops to the border with Iran and Turkey. “If security is not provided by the neighbors, our country will take action on its own, which will definitely cause border tensions,” he said. Fallahi was commenting on recent remarks by Iraqi Interior Minister Abdul Amir al-Shimmari, who announced that Iraq has taken measures to bring under control the country’s borders with Iran and Turkey. “The Iraqi border is a red line, and there will be no dereliction in controlling them,” al-Shimmari told Al Arabiya. He added, “There was a…

An attack in the city of Raqqa has killed six members of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), officials said. SDF commander Mazloum Abdi said in a statement on Monday that an ISIL (ISIS) cell had targeted security and military buildings in the city, killing six fighters and wounding an unspecified number of others. He added that intelligence gathered by the group “indicates serious preparations by [ISIL] cells”. Siamand Ali, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, told The Associated Press that a group of five people believed to be part of an ISIL sleeper cell, two of them…