© 2014, The Authors Middle East Policy © 2014, Middle East Policy Council Ten years after the U.S. invasion and two years after the complete withdrawal of American forces from its soil, Iraq faces a number of challenges to its long-term stability and development. These range from corruption to poor public services, from rising terrorist violence to ethnosectarian tensions in the context of a co...

Increasingly, the deployment of e-government initiatives in the Public Administration arena has become mandatory. However, the adoption of this new paradigm needs to be followed up with training processes involving all the professionals within public organizations. In this context, one solution that has emerged lies in the creation of regional capacity-building networks in e-government. The obj...

Introduction: Here, we present two case reports of adult female patients with the pathologic diagnosis of large sacrococcygeal teratoma. Case Series: In the first patient (aged 19 years), pelvic ultrasonographic examination showed a large (85.9×88.7 mm) multiloculated complex cyst posterior to the cervix. No evidence of recurrence was observed post-resection. The histological examination of the...

Constitutional arrangements in parts of the UK have been transformed by political devolution. In the English regions the Government has pursued a more cautious approach based upon reinforcing the regional tier through administrative decentralisation. Nonetheless, such reforms represent a significant strengthening of the machinery of regional governance and open up opportunities for the recalibr...

BACKGROUND The health system of Iraqi Kurdistan is severely understudied, particularly with regard to patient-physician interactions and their effects. We examine patterns of behaviour among physicians in Kurdistan, the justifications given and possible enabling factors, with a view to understanding accountability both from above and below. METHODS An ethnographic study was conducted in the S...

Just months after Aff an Hamakhan Jafar graduated from medical college at the University of Mosul, Iraq, in 1985, his career took a sharp turn in an utterly unexpected direction. After fi nishing his internship in Mosul, Jafar had planned to go to Europe for postgraduate work, then perhaps to work as a general practitioner in Kurdistan, the northern Iraqi region where he was born. Instead, in l...

This article explores how a second-order minority, northern Iraq’s Christians, mobilized to protect homelands during state breakdown and recalibration. It examines an Iraqi Christian political party, the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM), responded rise spread of Islamic State. More specifically, it analyzes ADM’s creation self-defense force, Nineveh Plains Protection Units (NPU), party positi...

conclusions iraqi nurses identified factors such as limited health resources, lack of job description, and professional unaccountability as major safety issues in maternity services. these findings alarm the need to ensure the provision of females and neonates with appropriate care. this, however, would require coordination between iraqi kurdistan health authorities to provide midwifery care fa...

Landmines: A Deadly Legacy (“ Deadly Legacy”) is both a powerful advocacy piece calling for an international ban on the production, stockpiling, trade, and use of landmines, as well as a compelling reference work carefully detailing what can only be deemed a global landmines crisis. The book, a joint effort of The Arms Project, a division of Human Rights Watch, and of Physicians for Human Right...