ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Kurdish President Massoud Barzani headed for Germany on Thursday to take part in the Munich Security Conference where world leaders will discuss global issues, including the war in Syria and Iraq and the refugee crisis it has provoked.
Barzani, who is heading a delegation, is expected to deliver a speech and meet world leaders on the sidelines of the three-day meeting that opens on Friday.
Kurdistan is in the frontline of the war with insurgents fighting under the banner of the Islamic State (ISIS), but locally known as Daesh. Erbil also has taken in some 1.5 million refugees, a tremendous burden on the autonomous enclave whose own total population is an estimated 5 million.
Iran’s nuclear talks, the Ebola outbreak, cyber terrorism and Russia’s war in Ukraine are other issues on the conference agenda.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will be hosting world leaders that include US Vice President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroschenko.
Some 60 foreign and defense ministers will also be at the 51st Munich Security Conference, including Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.
German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, the main organizer of the event, said that the meeting takes place as the world faces an “unprecedented upsurge in global crises” over the past year.
“We live in the age of the collapse of order,” he said, while he criticized the impotence of the United Nations to act.
“The UN Security Council should be resolving a crisis a week -- Iraq, Syria,” he said. “Instead, the council is blocked and so is any will to reform.”
