Kurdistan Observer

A former US diplomat has met with Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) chief Massoud Barzani here at the start of a visit to the Western-protected Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, a KDP source said Monday.

Peter Galbraith, who served as the first US ambassador to Croatia from 1993 and documented the Iraqi authorities' attacks against the Kurds in the late 1980s, arrived Saturday in the enclave, which has been off limits to Baghdad since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, via Syria.

He met on Sunday with Barzani, whose KDP is based in Arbil and shares control of the Kurdish region with Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

Galbraith, now a professor at the National Defense University in Fort McNair, near Washington, will meet other Kurdish officials during his trip, aimed at assessing the situation in the region, which he had visited in 1991 after the end of the Gulf War.

Galbraith documented attacks against the Kurds by the government of President Saddam Hussein when he served as senior advisor to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1979-1993) and was Washington's ambassador in Zagreb until 1998.