SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – A key international forum in the Kurdistan Region, held annually for the past three years, opens this week at a particularly challenging time for the Kurds, who have been on the forefront of the war with Islamic State (ISIS) since last summer. The third annual forum, the signature event of the Institute of Regional and International Studies at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS), features senior politicians, leading academics, researchers and military experts - including former US general David Petraeus - for wide ranging talks on regional and international issues. The two-day event that opens Wednesday, under the title “Fertile Crescent in Turmoil: Challenges and Opportunities,” will explore a region at war with ISIS since the Sunni extremists stormed across Iraq, seizing a third of the country. The Kurdistan Region, an autonomous enclave in northern Iraq that now shares a 1,000-kilometer border with an ISIS “caliphate” that extends over Iraq and Syria, has been struggling to meet the challenges of a war imposed on it by ISIS. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has been straining under the burden of some 1.4 million refugees from neighboring Syria and other parts of Iraq, an economic crisis caused by the war and Baghdad’s failure to live up to financial commitments as well as proclaimed weapons shortages as it accuses Baghdad of withholding or delaying arms shipments sent by coalition countries. The AUIS forum will be opened by Barham Salih, former prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), with a keynote address by Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs Dr. Ibrahim Al-Jaafari. The forum, which according to AUIS is meant to “to bring prominent intellectuals and practitioners to the cultural hub of Sulaimani, Iraq; to foster a diverse and rigorous academic dialogue,” will be attended be a long list of experts and dignitaries. Topics of discussion will include energy, humanitarian crises and a second-day discussion titled “Strategy to defeat Daesh: end game or seeds for new conflict.” Among the many panelists from the KRG will be Yousif Muhammed Sadiq, speaker of parliament, Qubad Talabani, deputy prime minister, and Minister of Peshmerga Mustafa Qadir. The Baghdad government will be represented by, among others, Minister of Oil Adil Abdulmahdi, Finance Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Hussein Shahrastani, Minister of Higher Education, and Faleh Fayadh, national security advisor. Prominent foreign experts include Dr Joost Hiltermann, Middle East program director for the International Crisis Group, Sir John Jenkins, former UK ambassador to Iraq, and Vitaly Naumkin, of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Also scheduled to participate are US Ambassador to Iraq Stuart Jones and Brett McGurk, the US deputy special envoy to the coalition to fight ISIS. AUIS is a non-profit university founded in 2007 to provide American-style education, according to the school’s website.
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