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A survey by the Kurdistan Minstiry of Health shows that 41 percent of women have gone under the practise of female genuital mutilation (FGM). The survey was carried out in July this year. The results of the survey were announced during a campaign to raise awareness on violence against women in Kurdistan earlier this week. Part of the campaign has focused on FGM. The survey by the government shows that mothers are the main party responsible for forcing their daughters experience the painful ritual and then grandmothers and fathers.

Kurdistan: The Other Iraq - '60 Minutes', reported by Bob Simon (link to video of the segment that aired below) Modern buildings are popping up all over Erbil, the de facto capital of the region called Kurdistan. Excerpt - Try to imagine a peaceful and stable Iraq where business is booming and Americans are beloved. Now open your eyes because 60 Minutes is going to take you to a part of Iraq which fits that description: it's called Kurdistan. Technically, it's inside Iraq but the Kurds who live there behave as if they already live in a separate state. As...

TEHRAN, (Reuters) - Iran said on Friday it would soon lodge a complaint with the U.N. Security Council about the arrest by U.S. troops of five Iranians, who Washington says were backing militants in Iraq but who Tehran says are diplomats. U.S. soldiers seized the men in a raid on an Iranian government office in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil on Jan. 11, hours after U.S. President George W. Bush pledged to crack down on the "flow of support" from Iran to Iraqi militants. Washington regularly accuses Iran of encouraging violence in Iraq, a charge Tehran dismisses saying the...

Tehran, 17 Jan. (AKI) - One of the five Iranians arrested last week by the US army in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil is wanted in Austria in connection with the assassination of Kurdish leader Andol Rahman Ghassemlu in 1989. Mahommad Jaafari Sharoudi was one of five Iranian officials detained last week in the Kurdish-controlled city on charges of being connected to a faction of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Pasdaran, that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq. Abdol Rahman Ghassemlu, the historic leader of Iranian Kurds, was killed in an apartment in the outskirts of the Austrian capital...

<p>WASHINGTON - An order from President Bush authorized a series of U.S. raids against Iranians in Iraq as part of a broad military offensive, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday.</p> <p>Bush issued the order several months ago, Rice told The New York Times as she prepared to visit the Middle East. She said the president acted "after a period of time in which we saw increasing activity" among Iranians in Iraq "and increasing lethality in what they were producing."</p>

TEHRAN, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Iran is demanding the immediate release of five Iranians held by U.S. forces in Iraq, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Sunday, adding that the five are diplomats. The five were arrested on Thursday in the northern Iraqi town of Arbil and the U.S. military has accused them of links to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard group that provides weapons to Iraqi insurgents. "Americans should immediately release the five Iranians and pay compensation for the damages they caused to our office in Arbil," Mohammad Ali Hosseini told a weekly news conference, adding the five were...

* Kristinn Taylor's Audio Report from Iraq - CLICK HERE TO LISTENKristinn's Written Dispatch from Monday, November 6, 2006: The families had an incredible day in Iraq today! In the morning, they met with American troops stationed outside Erbil. It was a very emotional meeting. One soldier is from the same town as one of our parents. Another mother arranged for the Gold Star flag to be delivered to the family of a soldier from one of the units stationed up here who was recently killed in action. The families presented the troops with a banner signed by Americans back...

Condoleezza Rice in Iraqi Kurdistan after Baghdad ERBIL (Iraq) - the American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived Friday morning at Erbil, principal city of Iraqi Kurdistan, for discussions with the president of the autonomous area of Kurdistan Massoud Barzani, noted a journalist of AFP. Mrs. Rice had arrived Thursday to Iraq, in Baghdad, for a surprised visit intended to encourage the process of national reconciliation Iraqi, after visits in Israel and in the Palestinian territories. The American Secretary of State must go to London later in the course of the day to take part in the meeting of...

ERBIL, Iraq - If a neighborhood is defined as a place where human beings move in and never leave, then the world's oldest could be here at the Citadel, an ancient and teeming city within a city girded by stone walls. Resting on a layer cake of civilizations that have come and gone for an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 years, the Citadel looms over the apartment blocks of this otherwise rather gray metropolis in Iraqi Kurdistan. The settlement rivals Jericho and a handful of other famous towns for the title of the oldest continuously inhabited site in the world. The...

Baghdad – Abdel Kareem Al Enezi, minister of Iraqi national security, has announced the existence of a mutual plan for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from the secure cities during this month (August). Al Enezi said that the plan includes the withdrawal of the multinational forces from 7 secure Iraqi cities and hading them over, to Iraqi authorities. Al Enezi pointed out that the 7 provinces are Najaf, Karbala, Al Naseria, Al Diwaneya, Al Samawa, Al Selaimania and Erbil. He noted that the procedures of withdrawal from some of these cities have already started. On their behalf, the American...

ALARM - Forty-five died in an attack commits suicide in Erbil in Iraq ERBIL (Iraq) - Forty-five people were killed and 90 wounded in an attack commits suicide made Wednesday with Erbil, in Kurdistan of Iraq, according to the governor Nawzad Hadi.

Politics: 23 February 2005, Wednesday. The beheaded body of a woman has been discovered in the suburbs of the town of Erbil, Northern Iraq, the Iraqi daily Sabah reported. Police say the body might of the journalist who was kidnapped two days ago in the town of Mosul. Raeda Wazzan, a journalist working for a government-funded television station, was kidnapped along with her son, aged 10.

Video Captures Images of Iraq Suicide Bomber At Least 101 Were Killed in Joint Attacks on Kurdish Groups MSNBC News Services Updated: 2:06 p.m. ET Feb. 03, 2004 IRBIL, Iraq - A video camera captured images of a man shaking hands with a Kurdish official seconds before blowing himself up in one of the two suicide bombings during Muslim holiday celebrations that killed 101 people. Kurds blamed Ansar al-Islam, a militant group allegedly linked to al-Qaida, for the attacks./snip/The PUK video shows only the back of the bomber’s head as he joined the line. The man, apparently in his 20s...

ON CHRISTMAS DAY in Erbil--the semi-official capital of the semi-official entity known as Iraqi Kurdistan--over 100 delegates from across northern Iraq gathered in a meeting hall that resembled nothing so much as an inner city high school auditorium, complete with rows of battered faux-leather chairs and dim fluorescent lighting. An improbably huge Kurdish flag was draped across the rear of the stage--three stripes of red, white, and green, with a golden sun at the center. The assembly was a cross-section of Iraqi society: a bespectacled professor of law from Sulaimaniya in a prim three-piece suit; a Yezidi doctor from Sinjar;...

A student from Manchester University who has been on Stop the War marches in London and Tony Blair's Sedgefield constituency has been arrested in northern Iraq amid concerns that he may have been fighting coalition forces in Iraq. Urslaan Khan, 21, originally from the prosperous Teesside town of Yarm near Middlesbrough, was taking an Arabic Studies degree at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Manchester University. Khan was spending his third year of the course at the University of Alexandria in Egypt where he was learning Arabic. His father, Abdul Khan, confirmed that his son had gone missing last...

The streets of the Kurdish capital, Erbil, filled with American, Iraqi and Kurdish flags yesterday as tens of thousands took to the street to celebrate the demise of the regime. Kurdish Iraqis celebrate in the northern Iraqi town of Arbil "Saddam, the criminal, the murderer, the savage, wild animal is gone," shouted a widow, Fauziya Ali, 45. "The black criminal, perpetrator of Halabja, is dead," she said. Halabja, a town that bore the brunt of Saddam Hussein's genocidal attempt to quell the Kurds with nerve agents and chemical weapons, is foremost among the reasons that the Kurdish people hunger for...

Iraqi forces began retreating from Erbil to take positions near Kirkuk and Mousel in northern Iraq, affirmed on Friday Kurdish opposition sources in a statement to KUNA. Iraqi forces in Khosh Tabba, 15 km south of Erbil, moved in the direction of oil-rich Kirkuk, said the sources, and other forces in Kalak Yaseen Agha, 20 km west of Erbil, moved to Mousel in Northwestern Iraq. The moves come ahead of expectations that coalition forces will soon enter Kirkuk and Mousel, with the support of the forces of the Kurdish opposition. The opposition sources emphasized the low state of morale of...

Three groups of ten American soldiers are established in Iraqi Kurdistan with Dohouk (northern), Erbil (center) and Suleimaniyah (south-eastern) where they prepare the arrival of GI' S for a possible war in Iraq, one indicated Tuesday to Dohouk of Kurdish military source. "There are Americans, soldiers, a group of 12 men with Dohouk, 10 in Erbil and 10 in Suleimaniyah", declared with the AFP a soldier graded high while refusing to specify to which body they belonged. "They prepare the arrival of (soldiers) American" for the opening of a northern face in Iraqi Kurdistan in the event of war...