Al-Monitor this week launched the Iraq Pulse, featuring original reporting and commentary from prominent reporters and analysts inside Iraq.

Iraqi politics, and the regional context in which they happen, are increasingly contentious, factionalized, and volatile, even by Iraq’s standards.

Relations between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Region have deteriorated even further since Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki deployed the Tigris Operational Command in disputed areas near Kirkuk in late 2012.  In addition to the ongoing dispute over a hydrocarbons law and revenue sharing, the military edge to the conflict is an ominous sign, reminiscent of the crisis in Khanaqin in 2008, when US intervention prevented a military confrontation.   As Ryan Crocker, former US ambassador to Iraq, told Al-Monitor recently, “The Kurdish region exists inextricably as part of a region that has never been more volatile than it is right now.”

Provincial elections, scheduled for this Spring, may be catalyst for score-settling among Iraq’s political parties, as Saleem Al-Hasani wrote this week for Al-Monitor.  Maliki is facing an uprising by Sunni groups in Ramadi and elsewhere. Shiite cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr is seeking to exploit the Sunni challenge to Maliki, as Ali Abdel Sadah reported for Al-Monitor.

The politics surrounding investigations into allegations of corruption in a Russian arms deal to Iraq and at Iraq’s Central Bank, both covered by Al-Monitor, have heightened the sense of crisis and instability in Iraq.