The prime minister owns Rudaw, the main television channel.Nonetheless, the Kurdish economy is incomparably livelier than that of the area controlled by Baghdad, let alone Mosul.
They are among 4,000 volunteers for the National Mobilisation Unit, a multi-ethnic force being assembled by Atheel al-Nujaifi, the governor of Mosul's Nineveh province.The men are preparing to be deployed to keep the peace in Mosul, if and when Iraq's second city is retaken from Islamic State (IS).
The country boosted security on its 500-mile border with Iraq in July, deploying thousands of troops to back up border guards after the jihadis captured Mosul, seized swaths of territory including Anbar province, and announced a caliphate straddling the border with Syria.
The UK move came as the US announced its most concerted bombing campaign yet over northern Iraq to drive Isis forces back, helping Kurdish forces to reclaim Mosul dam.
"Mosul Dam was liberated completely," Ali Awni, an official from Iraq's main Kurdish party, told Agence France-Presse, a statement also confirmed by another party official and a Kurdish security forces officer.
In a statement, the council said the alleged attack took place on a road between Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, and the Syrian border, as peshmerga forces fought to seize a vital supply line used by the Sunni militants.
"Many of those displaced fled from Mosul and its surroundings when violence erupted there in June and July," said Dr Chiara Lepora, Iraq programme manager for Médecins Sans Frontières.
"Before they were three provinces – Baghdad, Mosul and Basra.
As for the assertion that anti-tank or anti-aircraft weaponry, if delivered by the west, would fall into Isis hands, well, Filiu responds that this risk fades considerably compared to the huge quantity of American military equipment given to Isis last year when Mosul fell: the US equipped Iraqi army abandoned all its hardware to the assaillants.
Some of those who survived the forced march into the desert settled in places such as Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, where they built Armenian churches – churches that have once again been reduced to rubble by Bashar al-Assad's barrel bombs and Islamic State's murderous caliphate.
But Austin portrayed a battle to recapture Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, as long off, owing to an insufficiently capable Iraqi army.
