Sirri Sureyya Onder is neither a Kurd nor a politician. Yet, when the popular filmmaker and writer was approached by Turkey's Kurdish party to run for an Istanbul parliamentary seat in Sunday's elections, he felt he could not refuse. "This parliament has an opportunity to make history," he said, between campaign stops at coffeehouses in Zeytinburnu, a working-class district near Istanbul's airport populated by Kurds who migrated here over the past three decades years to flee fighting ...

Bombings in Iraq on Wednesday killed at least 19 people and wounded 58, mainly around Nineveh province, where political tensions have recently flared between Arabs and Kurds.

In an elaborately choreographed ceremony broadcast live on television, the leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan began pumping oil from Kurdish-controlled oil fields in northern Iraq through a pipeline to neighboring Turkey. It is the first time Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region has officially exported oil out of the country. For years, the central Iraqi government in Baghdad has been at odds with the Kurds, arguing they do not have the right to exploit oil in territory under Kurdish control. Kurdish officials ...

Even as Iraq's Sunni-Shi'ite divide appears to be tenuously mending, another seam in the country's patchwork multiethnic and sectarian society is on the verge of unraveling. Territorial disputes between Arabs and Kurds — in the provinces of Nineveh, Kirkuk and Diyala — now pose a serious risk of violence. In recent months, long-standing hostility between the two communities has escalated, whipped up by resurgent Arab secular nationalism. At the federal level, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has repeatedly said he ...

Now that President Obama has set the timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, the debate has begun over its possible consequences. Does it provide enough time for Iraqis to forge a functioning government and an economy that benefits everyone And if it doesn't, could a civil war be the result The plan, as outlined in a February 27 speech by Obama, calls for most U.S. troops to leave Iraq by August 2010. A "transitional force" ...