EgyptAir Suspends Flights to Baghdad until January 10

Bassem Abdel Kareem, spokesman for the  Egyptian Ministry of Civil Aviation, said that EgyptAir, the national carrier, has decided to suspend flights to Iraq as of tomorrow, Wednesday January 8, due to the tensions escalating there.

That decision will be in place for three days until Friday, January 10.

The company released a statement says that it seeks to secure safety of passengers boarding its planes heading for the Iraqi capital.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9481/index1.html

Abdel Kareem pointed out that the ministry follows the situation in Iraq thoroughly.

It assesses the security conditions in coordinating with the concerned agencies in Egypt.

Another decision will be declared  later when the security conditions get improved.

The spokesman advised passengers who booked with Egypt Air to contact  the call center of the company  to  change their reservations on the planes of the company.

After years of bitter and violent fighting, Iraq is finally becoming more stable. The main partisan political groups — Sunni, Kurd, and Shi'a — are cooperating to confront common concerns. The new, nonviolent political order, with the government of Iraq at its core, is winning growing popular support. Extremist groups, such as al Qaeda in Iraq, lack, at least for now, the ability to incite factional fighting. U.S. troops have begun their drawdown.

But the security situation is still shaky, and the end of U.S. occupation could bring consequences that could destroy Iraq's hard-won progress. Iraq's future stability and security depend mainly on two factors: first, whether the main political groups continue to engage peacefully in the political process and second, whether the Shi'a-led government of Iraq wields its growing political and military power responsibly.

As the United States departs, a (book) new RAND monograph, Security in Iraq: A Framework for Analyzing Emerging Threats as U.S. Forces Leave, offers decision makers a conceptual model to help assess the risks ahead — particularly of fighting among Iraq's main groups, many of which are sufficiently well armed to throw the country into a new cycle of violence.

The book suggests that the most likely dangers are not necessarily the most consequential and points to what the United States can do to help guard against a renewed upsurge of large-scale factional conflict that would undercut both Iraqi and U.S. interests.