Iraq

A senior foreign policy advisor to Iraqi Kurdish President Barzani discusses the state of U.S.-Kurdish military cooperation, the situation in Iraq and Syria, Kurdistan's economic needs, and the region's future.

Regional regulators must take steps, as the Iraqi Central Bank has done, to wall off their financial systems from unlicensed or loosely regulated money remitters vulnerable to exploitation by the Islamic State.

The security of the Kurdistan Region-Iraq (KRI) depends more on agreements between Erbil and Kurdistan’s neighbors than the KRI’s own security and intelligence capabilities. Whenever the regional powers surrounding the KRI have suspected that their interests are at risk, they have not hesitated to put the KRI’s security and stability

By taking an overcautious approach in Syria, the president has highlighted America's failure to have an open discussion about the real strategic lessons of the Iraq war.

Efforts to defeat the Islamic State cannot succeed without making clear to the group's adepts that their vision for society has no chance of remaining an effective battle cry in the long term, much less becoming a functioning state.

To have any hope of deterring, limiting, or winning the coming conflicts in the Middle East, Washington needs to widen its view beyond the Islamic State in the manner that regional states are already doing.

In the president's usage, the term "ground forces" conjures up massive numbers of troops obviously superfluous to the task of defeating the ill-trained, ill-equipped militias of the Islamic State.

For many factions operating in Iraq, defeating the Islamic State is not priority number one.

Restricting the group's access to banks has forced it to use riskier methods of moving money, but it still draws major revenue from extortion and other sources.