#iraq-recovery

#iraq-recovery

A 'workable system' of transit and shipowner confidence in the security of the transiting vessels is essential. This includes availability of insurance for transiting vessels, facilitating commercial trade financing, and sustained outbound vessel transits through the Strait of Hormuz.

Hezbollah warned that it has its finger on the trigger in case of Israeli violations of the temporary ceasefire, indicating a readiness to respond to perceived threats.

Kataib Hezbollah stated that Kittleson would be freed on the condition that she leave Iraq immediately. An anonymous Iraqi official confirmed her release to The Associated Press on Tuesday afternoon.

Against the intermittent thump of distant Israeli airstrikes, the elderly couple sit on the floor of a brightly coloured classroom, sobbing. Today they have fled their village in southern Lebanon under bombing, to this absurdly purple room covered in children's scrawls. Neither of them can walk. They carry only a few bags between them.

Iraq hasn't qualified for a World Cup for 40 years, it's a big challenge with a lot of pressure and they are a nation of 46 million that are obsessed with football.

We are on the trigger finger. After 22 years in the movement, we have never been this busy. The American-Israeli effort to bring down the Iranian regime is not likely to succeed without the help of PJAK and other Kurdish armed groups.

Numbering between 30 and 40 million worldwide, most live amid the peaks and valleys straddling the borders of Armenia, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. The Kurds link their history to that of the Medes, an ancient Middle Eastern people. They were left stateless a century ago when the borders of the modern Middle East emerged from the collapsing Ottoman empire.

Within hours of the United States-Israeli attacks on Iran, US assets in Iraq's Kurdistan region came under retaliatory attacks from Tehran-backed groups, dragging the country into the conflict that has since expanded across the Middle East and beyond. Since then, US assets located in Iraq have come under multiple attacks from pro-Iran groups and Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC).

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously predicted the conflict would last "six days, six weeks-I doubt six months." It lasted eight years, injured nearly 40,000 Americans, killed 4,500, and drained what Brown University's Costs of War project calculates as nearly $2 trillion in direct spending-with veterans' medical and disability payments projected to add $1 trillion more over 40 years.

More than 5,000 ISIL-linked (ISIS) detainees have been transferred from Syrian jails to a prison in neighbouring Iraq so far, according to Iraq's Ministry of Justice. In comments to the Iraqi News Agency on Friday, ministry spokesperson Ahmed Laibi said the transfers and ongoing detention of the prisoners had been carried out at the request of an international coalition led by the United States to combat ISIL, of which Iraq is a key member.

The lights are on in Aden at least for most of the day. The apparently mundane detail is a huge difference for people in the southern Yemeni port city, which for years has suffered from extensive electricity blackouts, and a sign that something has changed. It was noticeable enough for Saleh Taher, who lives in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, to comment on after making a recent visit to Aden.

Syrian transitional government troops and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had been fighting for weeks in northern Syria. On Tuesday evening, the announcement of a four-day ceasefire restored a measure of calm. SDF fighters were close allies of the international coalition battling the extremist "Islamic State,&quot, or IS, group in Syria and managed to take control of strategically important areas in Syria during 14 years of civil war. Recent clashes with Syrian government troops has pushed them out of these areas.

Life is cautiously returning to the streets of Dilling, the second largest city in South Kordofan state, after the Sudanese army broke a suffocating siege that had isolated the area for more than two years. For months, the city had been encircled by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), cutting off vital supply lines and trapping civilians in a severe humanitarian crisis.

In 2025, the administration of US President Donald Trump ordered the US Agency for International Development to be closed; this year, it withdrew the country from 66 international organizations. Other Western nations that are plagued with high levels of debt and pressure to prioritize domestic challenges have slashed their foreign aid, too. According to projections, official development assistance dropped by 9-17% in 2025, amounting to some US$55 billion.

The Syrian government's takeover of key oil and gas fields from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the country's northeast has raised hopes for the revival of its dilapidated energy sector after years of war and international sanctions. Syrian officials announced on Sunday that the government forces had taken control of several oilfields, including al-Omar, Syria's largest, and the Conoco gas complex in the country's north and northeast.

Some 182,000 Kurds living in Iraqi Kurdistan were killed in 1988 by chemical weapons launched by Saddam Hussein's regime in a series of attacks known as the Anfal campaign. That campaign included chemical attacks on Halabja, a village on the Iraq-Iran border, and other communities. Five thousand people are estimated to have died in Halabja. They were the victims of sarin and VX nerve agents, and mustard gas.