The Kurds Keep Remaking the Middle East
Fifteen years after the Iraq war, they're redrawing the map of the region—much to the displeasure of surrounding powers.
Kurds celebrated their traditional new year, Nowruz, this week, and to mark the occasion, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi gave them a peace offering of sorts. “I want to congratulate our Kurdish citizens in Kurdish,” he said Tuesday during his weekly news conference in Baghdad. “I don’t speak it, but it is meant to prove that Iraq is one and united.”
That moment was believed to mark the first time a modern Iraqi leader has spoken in Kurdish, which, along with Arabic, is an official language of Iraq. And he accompanied that with a more substantive overture, agreeing to transfer more than $250 million to the Kurdish Regional Government to help pay the salaries Kurdish government workers and security forces.
