Word: kurdistan
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February is not a great month to invade northern Iraq. The mountains of the Kurdish autonomous region are foreboding year around, which is precisely why they teem with guerilla bases of the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK, a militant group at war with neighboring Turkey. But in winter, the mountains become an easy place for a foreign army to get stuck in the snow and die in the cold...
...real aim of the Turkish military incursion is not so much to wipe out the PKK, as it is to harass the Kurdish region that is increasingly behaving as a state in the making. Turkey has long been hostile to the very idea of an autonomous - let alone independent - Kurdistan, which they fear would incite secessionist feelings among Turkey's own Kurdish minority. At the same time, Iraq's Kurdish leaders have been unwilling to move against the PKK, having tried and failed to defeat them during the 1990s. Instead, they have urged Turkey to seek a political solution...
...identity in an overwhelmingly Muslim region. Christians have lived in Iraq almost since the beginning of Christianity itself, and though they presumably fell in love and married just like everyone else for centuries, love became something of a cottage industry in Ankawa after the first Gulf war. When the Kurdistan broke away from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the town became a hub for single Christian men living abroad who could now return in search of a mate just like...
...Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, however, the stakes have gotten higher. As a conspicuous (and prosperous) minority group, Christians have made easy targets for all sides of Iraq's sectarian civil war. Because Ankawa is situated in the relative safety of Kurdistan, the town of 20,000 has seen its population jump by a half in just a matter of years as refugees have poured in from violence further south. Osama Thomas, the owner of Love Vision, a store in Ankawa that makes wedding videos, said about 80 percent of his clients were from Baghdad (which he left...
...newly armed Sunnis as part of a unified security structure and also be able to resolve their own differences in places like Basra, where a three-way gang war is taking place; and whether the Kurds can accept the fact that Kirkuk can't be controlled by Kurdistan if Iraq is to survive...