While the Iraqi army along with the Shiite paramilitary force Hashed al-Shaabi — or Popular Mobilization Units — and Iranian fighters under the command of Gen. Qasem Soleimani were routing the Islamic State (IS) at Saddam Hussein’s birthplace of Tikrit in the heartland of Sunni Iraq, it was indeed an interesting experience to watch, from a distance of three hours away, the evolving military and political situation.

Sulaimaniyah is known as Kurdistan’s cultural capital and has been the bastion for Kurdish national sentiment for nearly a century. It has long been the power base of Iraq’s first Kurdish President Jalal Talabani in the post-Saddam period, and the town itself is where the Kurdish Gorran (Change) movement was born and won two successive electoral victories.

It is also the hometown of Barham Salih, a Kurdish-Iraqi politician who served as deputy prime minister in Baghdad (2006-2009) and the Iraqi Kurdistan prime minister in Erbil (2001-2004) and hopes for a bright future for his homeland. That is perhaps the main reason he initiated founding an American university in Sulaimaniyah, in addition to the Sulaimani Forum, which has brought international luminaries as well as Iraqi and Kurdish political leaders to Sulaimaniyah since March 2013.

On March 11-12, the Third Annual Sulaimani Forum, “Fertile Crescent in Turmoil: Challenges and Opportunities,” was attended by high-level US officials as well as a number of Iraqi and Kurdish leaders. Here, IS was treated as one of the jihadist organizations operating in the region within the framework of the evolving sectarian conflict in Iraq.