Noticias

What is happening today in Iraq and Syria is due to decades of conflict between two major axes, Iran and the Arabs. It began with the 1979 Iranian revolution, and continued with threats to export the revolution throughout the region, and with the Iran-Iraq war that lasted eight years. Things only calmed down for two years, then Iraq invaded Kuwait, triggering international intervention.

La ofensiva de los últimos días contra el Estado Islámico amenaza a los yihadistas con expulsarlos de dos ciudades clave que han estado en su poder desde hace años, la iraquí Faluya y la siria Raqqa, y pone en peligro la continuidad del califato instaurado por Abu Bakr al Bagdadi y que ha servido de talismán para un gran número de musulmanes radicales de todo el mundo.

A group of Iraqi lawmakers announced their withdrawal on Saturday from a session of parliament aimed at selecting a replacement for the speaker, apparently leaving it without the necessary quorum.

Iraq was on course to have two rival claimants to the speakership, further increasing chaos in parliament, which has already seen a vote to sack speaker Salim al-Juburi, a fistfight among MPs and a sit-in this week.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have taken to the streets of Baghdad for the third week in a row to demand a political overhaul.

Gathering on Friday in the capital, protesters heeded a call to gather by powerful Shia cleric Muqtada al- Sadr, who is pressuring the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to push on with a plan to form a cabinet of independent ministers.

On Friday, a new report by the International Crisis Group, an independent research and policy institute, bluntly warned of both the political and military challenges in Iraq. Under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, the report declared, “Parliament has been rendered toothless, independent state agencies shorn of their powers. Ministries, to an unprecedented extent, have become bastions of nepotism and other forms of corruption; the severely politicized judiciary represents anything but the ‘rule of law,’ with even the Supreme Court doing the government’s bidding.”