Iraq/Kurdistan: Iraq Oil Deal Evokes Churchill in Islamic State Battle

Jan 8, 2015 | Selcan Hacaoglu and Zaid Sabah, Bloomberg
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Winston Churchill understood the significance of the black stuff seeping to the surface in the Kurdish plains of Mesopotamia when he included the region within Iraq as the British forged the nation in the 1920s.

In doing so, Churchill, the colonial secretary at the time, set in train almost a century of bickering between the Iraqi government and its Kurdish enclave over the area’s estimated 45 billion barrels of crude.