MANAMA, Bahrain — Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, speaking at the Manama Dialogue Regional Security Summit convened by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, warned of an “Islamic emirate” emerging in Syria.
Just this past week, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, attacked the ethnically mixed Iraqi city of Kirkuk, a further sign of the linkage between terrorism in Syria and Iraq. The relative security of Iraqi Kurdistan, whose capital, Erbil, suffered a deadly attack in October along with the rest of Iraq, is under an unprecedented threat from the spillover of the Syria war.