Trip Report on New Governments in Iraq and Kurdistan

As recently elected officials in Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government prepare to implement their platforms, they will need to deal with myriad challenges, including persistent signs of Islamic State insurgency, troubling deficits in governance and services, ongoing internal conflicts over land and oil, and the prospect of domestic fallout from increased U.S. sanctions on Iran. In this policy forum, four experts discuss how the U.S. government can update its strategy to help meet these challenges. The panel included Kenneth Pollack, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; Nussaibah Younis, a senior advisor to the European Institute of Peace; Michael Knights, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute, who has worked in all of Iraq’s provinces and spent time embedded with the country’s security forces; and Bilal Wahab, the Institute’s Nathan and Esther K. Wagner Fellow.