Author: Al Fanhur

Foreign undergraduate students at the University of Missouri hail from Afghanistan, India and South Korea. This year, some have been accepted into study abroad programs in Iraq and internships with local crisis shelters. But student visa rules forbid first-year students from working off-campus. And even when they are eligible, the permit process is complex and takes months. Adeleine Halsey of the Columbia Missourian profiles undergraduates who are running into these restrictions. (July 2023) Source : VOA News

Iraq has arrested a suspect in one of the most notorious war crimes of the Islamic State group, the 2014 massacre of up to 1,700 captive cadets, authorities said Thursday. After overrunning the air force academy at Camp Speicher where thousands of cadets were being trained, the Sunni extremists of IS separated out the Shiites and Christians among them and gunned them down one by one before dumping their bodies in mass graves or in the nearby Tigris River. The interior ministry identified the suspect as Abdelkhalek Khazaal Soltan and said he had been arrested in a joint operation by the…

A source in the Iraqi government revealed on Thursday that Baghdad and Erbil agreed that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) will deliver its production of oil to the Iraqi Ministry of Oil as part of an agreement on committing to the general budget law, the Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported. Under the agreement, the KRG is responsible for delivering the region’s oil production to the Oil Ministry in Baghdad, the source told INA. The Iraqi Ministry of Finance pays the KRG for the costs of production and transportation of the oil the Iraqi Oil Ministry has already received, according to…

Protesters angered by burning of copies of the Quran in Sweden set fire to the Swedish embassy in the Iraqi capital. Iraq has expelled the Swedish ambassador only hours after Iraqi protesters angered by the burning of copies of the Quran in Sweden stormed the Swedish embassy in central Baghdad, scaling the walls of the compound and setting it on fire. The Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, also recalled his country’s charge d’affaires in Sweden, the government said on Thursday, and suspended the working permit of Swedish telecom company Ericsson on Iraqi soil, according to state media. Early on Thursday morning, demonstrators…

Muslim-majority nations expressed outrage Friday at the desecration of a copy of the Quran in Sweden. Some prepared for street demonstrations following midday prayers to show their anger. In Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, protesters planned demonstrations after Swedish police permitted a protest Thursday in which an Iraqi Christian living in Stockholm kicked and stood on a Quran, Islam’s holy book, outside of the Iraqi Embassy. Hours before that, demonstrators in Baghdad broke into the Swedish Embassy and lit a fire to show their anger at his threats to burn the book. Iraqi Prime Minister Shia al-Sudani has ordered the expulsion…

A jury on Tuesday found six people guilty of terrorist murder for extremist attacks in Brussels in 2016 that killed 32 people and were claimed by the Islamic State group, in Belgium’s deadliest peacetime violence, according to Belgian media. Among those convicted for their role in the suicide bombings at Brussels’ airport and a subway station was Salah Abdeslam, who already is serving a life sentence without parole in France over his role in attacks that hit Paris cafes, the Bataclan theater and France’s national stadium in 2015. The verdict was reported by public broadcaster RTBF, newspaper Le Soir and news websites…

A Princeton doctoral student has been kidnapped in Iraq while conducting research in the country, according to Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Elizabeth Tsurkov, 36, was in Iraq conducting field research for her doctoral dissertation at Princeton University. Netanyahu said that Tsurkov, an Israeli native, is being held by the Kata’ib Hezbollah, which the National Counterterrorism Center describes as an Iraqi Shia militant group. Netanyahu also said in his statement that Tsurkov was still alive, and that Israel holds Iraq “responsible for her safety and well-being.” He said that she used her Russian passport to visit Iraq “at her own initiative,” in connection with…

The redistribution of oil profits has appeased the political elites, but the peace and quiet will not last long. While Iraq was teetering on the edge of a full-fledged internal conflict last summer, today, the country seems to enjoy a level of stability not seen in the past two decades. This is due to a shared desire across the political spectrum, particularly within the Shia community, to stabilise the country. After last year’s intense power struggle among Shia factions, efforts were made to minimise conflicts between armed groups, suppress critical voices, and reduce public dissent. As a result, the government of…

In 2014, thousands of Yazidi women and children were enslaved by the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq and Syria. Their fellow Yazidis launched a rescue effort almost immediately, but nearly a decade later, their task is still unfinished. In November 2015, Bahar and her three young children had just been sold for the fifth time. She had been one of many Yazidi women taken prisoner by IS, who had swept into her village in the Sinjar district of northern Iraq 18 months earlier. A religious minority living in Iraq for nearly 6,000 years, the Yazidis were considered infidels by…

The Iraqi Minister of Oil, Hayan Abdul-Ghani, said that Iraq aims to achieve self-sufficiency in gas within the coming five years. Abdul-Ghani explained that Iraq issued licenses for the exploration of oil and gas fields in western Iraq, which will enable Iraq to produce more than 1.5 billion cubic feet of gas. In a statement to Emirates News Agency (WAM), the Iraqi Oil Minister, during his participation in the OPEC conference in Vienna, elaborated that Iraq possesses oil reserves exceeding 144 billion cubic meters of oil and more than 133 trillion cubic feet of gas. Abdul-Ghani pointed out that a…