Kurdistan in America

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Dr. Lori Mason as its guest in the ninth episode of Season Three. Dr. Lori Mason is a Senior Technical Expert for IREX, a global development and education organization. She has over twenty years of experience leading a wide range of education programming, with nearly a decade in the Kurdistan Region.  Dr. Mason has designed progr...

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Ms. Xeyal Qertel as its guest in the eighth episode of Season Three. Ms. Qertel is the President and Founder of the New York Kurdish Cultural Center. She founded the organization in 2017 to provide a safe space for diaspora Kurds in New York to reclaim and celebrate their cinema, poetry, literature, and music—and to introduce non...

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Mr. Hadi Pir as its guest in the seventh episode of Season Three. This special episode comes just one week before the 8th anniversary of the genocide committed by ISIS, or Daesh, against the Yazidis in 2014.   On August 3, 2014, members of the terrorist organization Daesh, also known as ISIS, unleashed a savage attack against Yaz...

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Brigadier General Hazhar Ismail as our guest in the sixth episode of Season Three. General Hazhar Ismael is a Senior Advisor at the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs. He followed in his father's footsteps by joining the peshmerga forces three decades ago. He helped establish the Freedom Battalion, the first Iraqi battalion creat...

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Dr. Adhid Miri as our guest in the fifth episode of Season Three. Dr. Miri is the Director of Projects at the Chaldean Community Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce in Michigan. He has had leadership roles across various programs, including the resettlement and integration of refugees.  Dr....

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Ms. Dilman Yasin and Ms. Wan Rashid, Kurdish-American activists from the Kurdish diaspora in Nashville, as its guests this month. Dilman was born in Kuremay, a village outside of Duhok City, and came to America with her family at the age of five. She is currently a Performance Manager in the Nashville Mayor's office and the...

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Ms. Ashti Waissi as its guest this month. Ms. Waissi is Legislative Assistant at the Canadian Parliament and a former staff assistant to the Co-Founder of the Parliamentary Friends of the Kurds Group, Mr. Tom Kmiec, MP for Calgary Shepard. She has a dual degree in Political Science and Sociology.   Ms. Waissi's family is fro...

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Congressman Jim Langevin as its guest this month. Congressman Langevin has been Representing Rhode Island's 2nd Congressional District since 2001. He is a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Homeland Security. He shares his history of service in Congress and the potentially devastating ex...

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Mr. Sarhang Hamasaeed as our guest in the first episode of Season Three. Mr. Hamasaeed is the director of Middle East Programs at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, DC. He is also a regular lecturer at the Foreign Service Institute on ISIS and challenges to governance in Iraq. The USIP is an American nonpa...

Send us Fan Mail This is a special podcast message from the Kurdistan Regional Government Representation in the United States. Several members of Congress introduced a bipartisan resolution, Concurrent Resolution 32, to the House of Representatives Commemorating the 30th anniversary of Operation Provide Comfort and Kurdish-American partnership. The resolution was also introduced to the US Senate b...

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have General James Jones as our guest in this special edition. General Jones was the 32nd Commandant of the US Marine Corps, the Supreme Allied Commander for the European Command, and National Security Advisor to President Barrack Obama. He was also one of the original commanders of Operation Provide Comfort, the military-humanitarian...

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Ms. Karen Young as its guest this month. Ms. Young is a senior fellow and founding director of the Program on Economics and Energy at the Washington DC-based think tank, the Middle East Institute. Previously, she was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on the political economy of the Middle East and...

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Senator Chris Van Hollen as its guest in this special bonus edition. Senator Van Hollen, who has a long record of public service in the US Congress, has co-sponsored S.Con. Res.16 with Senator Marco Rubio. The bipartisan resolution commemorates the anniversary of Operation Provide Comfort, the humanitarian-military mission that a...

Send us Fan Mail This month, the Kurdistan in America podcast is going north to Canada and is pleased to have the Honorable Tom Kmiec MP as its guest. Mr. Kmiec is serving his third term as a Member of the Canadian Parliament for Calgary Shepard. He is also the co-founder of the Canadian Parliamentary Friends of the Kurds. Mr. Kmiec shares his insights on Canada's involvement in the Kurdistan...

Send us Fan Mail This month, the Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Dr. Matthew Zais as its guest. Matt is the former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of International Affairs at the US Department of Energy. Currently, he serves as the Vice President of Government Relations at HKN Energy, which has invested in Kurdistan’s oil sector. Matt also served as Iraq Directo...

Send us Fan Mail This month, the Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Colonel David Williams as its guest. Colonel Williams is the former Director of the Counter-ISIS Coalition's Kurdistan Coordination Center, part of the Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve. He was stationed in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region, for one year.  He shares with us his experie...

Send us Fan Mail This month, the Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to host Mr. Rob Waller as our guest. Mr. Waller was the US Consul General in Erbil for one year from July 2020 and has just completed his assignment in Kurdistan. He has previously served as a career member of the Senior Foreign Service of the United States in several capacities, including the Director of the Office of Iraq A...

Send us Fan Mail This month, the Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to host Ms. Nadine Maenza as our guest. Ms. Maenza currently serves as the Chair of the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission created by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act that monitors the universal right to freedom of re...

Send us Fan Mail This month, the Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Colonel Myles Caggins as its guest. Colonel Caggins currently serves as the Director of the Public Affairs for the U.S. Army’s III Corps at Fort Hood, Texas, and was the former Spokesperson for the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve: The international military intervention against ISIS.  He shares...

Send us Fan Mail This month, the Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Dr. David Pollock as its guest. Dr. Pollock is the Bernstein Fellow and Director of the Fikra Forum at The Washington Institute. He sheds light on his experience working as a regional expert on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff during Operation Provide Comfort, his visit to Baghdad at the height of the co...

Send us Fan Mail This month, the Kurdistan in America podcast is honored to have Sherri Kraham Talabany as its guest. When Mrs. Kraham Talabany first heard about Kurdistan as an American university student, little did she realize that her life would be inexorably tied to the people of that land. Ms. Kraham went on to work for the US government, which included working on Kurdistan and Iraq, and she...

Send us Fan Mail This episode features a discussion with David Tafuri, the President of the United States Kurdistan Business Council (USKBC), an advisor to the Kurdistan Regional Government Representation in the United States, and a political commentator on Fox News. Mr. Tafuri sheds light on the mission of the USKBC and the organization’s activities in the Kurdistan Region, his experience working...

Send us Fan Mail This episode of the Kurdistan in America features a discussion with two distinguished guests from the American University of Kurdistan (AUK): Dr. Honar Issa, the Secretary of the Board of Trustees, and Dr. Randall Rhodes, the President of the American University of Kurdistan. As a pioneer at the university, Dr. Honar discusses the university's mission and vision, its challeng...

Send us Fan Mail With ISIS only a few miles away, you'd think that the last thing an American NGO would want to do is start considering restoring a tomb in Iraq of a prophet from the Old Testament. But that's exactly what ARCH International did in 2014 when it began to look at the tomb of Prophet Nahom in Al Qosh.  In this episode of the Kurdistan in America Podcast, Delovan Barwari, fro...

Send us Fan Mail The Kurdistan In America podcast welcomes Kathy Keary from the Mines Advisory Group, known as MAG, which has been working in Kurdistan Region in Iraq since 1992. Ms. Keary says that  Kurdistan Region alone would be in the top five most contaminated countries in the world affected by landmines and unexploded ordnance, while Iraq as a whole is in the top three. Find out in this inte...