We begin with the military offensive underway against the Islamic State in Northern Iraq near the Syrian border involving U.S. Special Forces and 7,500 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters (who incidentally due to falling oil prices have not been paid in months). Max Hoffman, a Policy Analyst on the National Security and International Policy team at the Center for American Progress who focuses on Turkey and the Kurdish regions, joins us to discuss the capture of the important Highway 47 that cuts off the Islamic State in Mosul and shuts down their export of stolen oil from the main oil field they’ve captured.
The above excerpt was originally published in Background Briefing.
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