On a first visit to Erbil a tourist will likely be surprised by the malls and mansions. The skyline climbs, as minarets compete with new high-rises reaching into the sky. …
Kenneth Depew
Kenneth Depew
Kenneth Depew is retired from the U.S. Army after having served two tours in Baghdad, Iraq as an Infantryman and one tour in Kunar Province as a Human Intelligence Collector. He served on Senator Ted Cruz’s 2012 U.S. Senate election campaign and on Senator Cruz’s senate staff. He is an alumnus of the University of St. Thomas in Houston where he studied political science and philosophy and Tel Aviv University where he earned a master of arts in security and diplomacy studies.
-
FeaturedNational Security
-
Kurdish politics in Iraq are not dominated by one political party or a single political philosophy. However, most Kurdish political parties are bound by a shared sense of Kurdish nationalism …
-
FeaturedNational Security
The Kurdistan Referendum Volume 7 – A Refuge for Minorities, A Safe Zone for Iraq’s Christians
As ISIL took control of Mosul and the Nineveh plains, refugees flowed into Kurdistan. The most vulnerable among them were the Christians, whose numbers in Iraq had dwindled to approximately …
-
The Kurdish Peshmerga have come to prominence in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In the fight against ISIL, the Peshmerga received praise for …
-
FeaturedNational Security
The Kurdistan Referendum Volume 5 – Beating the Islamic State and Expanding Borders
In early 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), born from the irreconcilable remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and brought to maturation through the brutal Syrian civil …
-
The Kurds in Iraq suffered brutally at the hands of Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s and during the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991. The rest of …
-
FeaturedNational Security
The Kurdistan Referendum Volume 3 – From the Iran-Iraq War, al-Anfal, to No-Fly Zones
In 1979, there was a turning point in the modern Middle East. Egypt, the most populous Arab state and the birthplace of Nasserism, signed a peace treaty with Israel, effectively …
-
By the eve of World War One, the once mighty Ottoman Empire was a shell of its former self. The turning points for the Ottomans had come centuries before, first …
-
On September 25th, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq will hold an independence referendum to determine the future of Iraqi Kurdistan. The decision to hold the referendum came from …
-
On Friday, July 21st, the Salomon family sat down at their table at their home in Halamish, a Jewish community in Samaria, to celebrate the arrival of a newborn grandson …