ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Months of drone strikes on refugee camps surrounding the city of Koya in the Kurdistan Region have pushed hundreds of families into the city center, giving rise to local security concerns even as many residents are stepping in to offer support. During the wider regional war that ensued following the US-Israeli aerial…

This November, representatives from around the world will convene in Antalya, Turkey, for the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31). Their discussions will revolve around familiar themes: rising temperatures, water scarcity, emissions, climate finance and adaptation. For many, this looks like another international conference…

In Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy, laws and constitutions are not born of "morality," but rather emerge from pure fear of chaos and total destruction. In 1947, Japan succumbed to this formula; it voluntarily shackled its own "military leviathan" and threw the key into the depths of the Pacific Ocean, hoping that the shadow of…

Again and again, young Yazidi women and men come to me, in Kurdistan, in the diaspora, after lectures, sometimes even in therapy, and ask me the same question: Are we Kurds and Yazidis, or are we only Yazidis? They often ask this question quietly, almost apologetically, as if the wrong answer could break something. They feel pressure both…

As the languishing mid-summer heat approaches its peak, the Iraqi Parliament is scheduled to host the Minister of Finance to evaluate Iraq’s economic situation. Monthly oil export revenues have dropped from 9 trillion Iraqi dinars ($6.8 billion) to 1.5 trillion Iraqi dinars ($1.14 billion) while monthly expenditures remain above 9…

The US redeployment of MIM-104 Patriot missile defense systems weeks ahead of the scheduled September 30 troop withdrawal deadline has substantial ramifications for the Kurdistan Region’s air defense. The autonomous enclave has relied entirely on US and coalition air defenses for protection against more than 900 Iranian and Iraqi…

On the night of August 3, 2014, my phone began to ring, and it would not stop. Twenty calls, then fifty, perhaps a hundred. All of them from Shingal (Sinjar), a town in northern Iraq. Friends were weeping and screaming into the phone: “Something unspeakable is happening here. They are killing people. Can no one help us?” I called…