Kurdistan readies for post-ISIS future

Masrour Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan region

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In 2015, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs were tasked with an unusual mandate: sounding out international institutional investors on the prospects of a bond from Kurdistan. To which the first question of many investors was: what’s Kurdistan? 

There is no official country of Kurdistan; there are regions of both Iran and Iraq that carry that name informally, but it isn’t a sovereign state.