FOREIGN POLICY/IRAQ/MILITARY: “The Iraqi Kurdish government has asked the U.S. to appoint a special envoy to mediate a deepening and potentially dangerous dispute between the central government in Baghdad and the semiautonomous Kurdish region, a top Kurdish official said Monday [11-20-17].
Falah Mustafa Bakir, the head of foreign relations for Iraqi Kurdistan, told The Wall Street Journal that he has approached U.S. officials with a request for the Americans to do more to address friction between Baghdad and the Kurdish government in Erbil. Iraqi military and Kurdish Peshmerga forces fought briefly after the Kurds held a disputed independence referendum in September, and still threaten each other in places along the boundary snaking through northern Iraq…
Mr. Bakir spoke while at the de facto Kurdish embassy, just blocks from the White House, while on a trip to the U.S. and Canada, undertaken in part to persuade the United Nations or the U.S. to provide on-the-ground diplomatic support for the region. He is scheduled to meet with national security adviser H.R. McMaster on Tuesday to discuss the matter, he said.
A representative of the Iraqi government declined to comment on the matter. The U.S. said it is weighing the Kurdish request.”
-Ben Kesling, “Kurds, Warning of Hostilities in Iraq, Appeal for a U.S. Envoy,” The Wall Street Journal online, Nov. 20, 2017 06:41pm