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After the American Shield: What the US Withdrawal Means for Iraqi Kurdistan and Iraq’s New Security Order

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  US withdrawal reshapes Iraq’s security order, exposing Kurdistan to new risks while testing Baghdad’s sovereignty and defence capacity. Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj The United States is preparing to complete the withdrawal of its remaining military forces from Iraq by September 30, closing a 23-year chapter that began with the 2003 invasion and evolved into a long-term counterterrorism partnership. For Baghdad, the departure represents the restoration of sovereignty and the transition toward a bilateral security relationship. For Erbil, however, the same event is being experienced through a fundamentally different security lens. The immediate question is not whether Iraq should possess greater sovereignty, but what happens to the security architecture that has protected the Kurdistan Region while that sovereignty remains contested in practice. The withdrawal therefore exposes a strategic contradiction at the centre of post-ISIS Iraq: Baghdad is gaining greater formal control over national ...
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Where is Yemen headed? Will the Houthis be defeated this time? | Kurdish Policy Analysis

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 Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj Yemen's war has entered a new phase as Saudi-backed forces pressure the Houthis across seven fronts. Is a decisive battlefield shift underway? The war in Yemen appears to have entered a new phase over the past 24 hours, marked by a rapid and unusually coordinated multilateral shift on the battlefield. The simultaneous activation of seven fronts by forces aligned with Saudi Arabia suggests that the objective is no longer simply to capture additional territory. It appears designed to disperse Houthi forces, disrupt their lines of support, stretch their defensive formations and create weaknesses that can be exploited elsewhere. If this operational tempo is sustained, the next several days could become decisive. The central question is whether the Saudi-backed forces can maintain pressure across multiple fronts long enough to prevent the Houthis from concentrating their forces at the point of greatest danger. Alternatively, the apparent Houthi withdrawals could repr...
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From Erbil to the World: What Rudaw’s Guinness Record Says About Kurdish Soft Power

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Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj A Kurdish media organization has just produced a digital result that deserves to be understood as more than a communications milestone. On September 14, 2026, Rudaw Media Network announced that its digital platform had entered Guinness World Records after a Rudaw fact-checking video generated 284,007,601 views on Facebook within a 24-hour period. According to Rudaw, the video , published on July 24, 2026, became the most-viewed Facebook video within a 24-hour window globally and subsequently ranked among Facebook's most-watched videos overall. Rudaw has described the achievement as a milestone for Kurdish digital media and as evidence that professional journalism produced in the Kurdistan Region can reach audiences far beyond its immediate geographical constituency. The significance of the achievement, however, is not adequately captured by the number 284 million. In geopolitical terms, the more important question is what happens when an institution based in E...
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The Gulf’s strategic chokepoint crisis | Kurdish Policy Analysis

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  Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran face a widening struggle over pipelines, Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab, reshaping Gulf geopolitics and energy security. The Middle East is entering a more dangerous phase of the Iran–Gulf confrontation in which the central strategic issue is no longer simply the exchange of missiles and drones, but the control of the region’s energy and maritime arteries . In the space of days, Saudi Arabia has faced attacks launched from Iraqi territory against its East-West oil pipeline, Qatar has publicly backed Riyadh’s restraint, Iran and the Gulf states are preparing another diplomatic effort in Oman, and Iran-aligned Houthi forces have seized strategically important territory around the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Taken together, these developments reveal an emerging regional contest over whether energy can continue to move through the Gulf and Red Sea despite the wider war. The most consequential development for Iraq and the Gulf is the reported drone a...
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Iraq’s Minorities Are Not Just a Humanitarian Issue — They Are a Test of the State

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Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj Iraq’s minority question is often presented primarily as a humanitarian concern: communities displaced by war, religious sites destroyed, families unable to return home and survivors requiring assistance. That framing is understandable, but it is incomplete. Iraq’s experience since 2003 demonstrates that the survival of minority communities is inseparable from the country’s unresolved problems of governance, political representation, territorial competition and fragmented security. The central problem is therefore not simply that Iraq’s minorities have suffered repeated waves of violence. It is that the Iraqi state has repeatedly struggled to create political and security arrangements capable of protecting communities whose territories sit at the intersection of competing national, sectarian and geopolitical interests. The consequences are particularly visible in Nineveh, Sinjar and the wider disputed territories, where Baghdad, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG...
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