SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region — Kurdish members of the Iraqi parliament say “expectations are quite low” ahead of a crucial meeting between top Iraqi and Kurdish officials in Baghdad later this month in which oil and income issues will be addressed.
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) spokesman Safeen Dizayi announced earlier that KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani will head a delegation to the Iraqi capital to discuss pending issues relating to sales of oil and revenue sharing.
This is Barzani’s third visit to Baghdad since December last year after Haidar al-Abadi took office as Iraq’s prime minister with reluctant Kurdish support following a mass ISIS offensive across the country.
“I’m really not hopeful for the meeting because I doubt anything good will come out of it,” Musanna Amin, a Kurdish lawmaker in Baghdad, told Rudaw.
“I think in the end both parties (Baghdad and Erbil) will go on doing what they have so far been doing; the KRG sells its oil and Baghdad freezes people’s salaries,” Amin added.
The Iraqi government under former premier Nouri al-Maliki withheld much of the Kurdish share of the national budget, estimated at 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) a month, beginning in February last year. Baghdad justified the move as a response to the KRG’s sale of oil independent of Iraq’s central government.
Kurdish parties supported Iraq’s current Prime Minister Abadi to form a Cabinet- after Maliki was forced out of office in December last year, in return for the KRG’s frozen monthly budget.
But Kurdistan’s minister of natural resources, who administers oil exports from Kurdish-controlled territories—including from the vast Kirkuk oil field—said Abadi did not deliver his promises in regard to the revenue sharing.
“We received between $200 and $300 million a month since December while we agreed that the KRG should receive its monthly 1 billion euros,” Minister Ashti Hawrami said in an October Rudaw interview.
Baghdad has rejected the accusations and said the KRG has not exported the 550,000 barrels per day of oil (bpd) which it saw as a prerequisite for the release of the KRG’s frozen budget.
Hawrami, however, told Rudaw earlier the KRG had now passed 600,000 bpd with exports from Kirkuk included.
Another Kurdish lawmaker, Ashwaq Jaf, said “no mutual trust” exists at the moment between the KRG and Iraqi government, which is why she thinks a third party should be present at the coming meeting.
“A delegation from either the US or the UN could come to the meeting as the third party so that Kurds are not accused of undermining the agreement,” Jaf told Rudaw. She said one of the reasons Kurds supported Abadi’s Cabinet was US and UN insistence. “The Iraqi government has clearly violated the agreement, now they (the US and UN) should come with us to the meeting, because we already know Baghdad will not abide,” she added.
With ongoing crises hitting both the Iraqi and Kurdish economies, oil prices remaining relatively low and a refugee crisis becoming more dire as winter sets in across northern parts of the country, officials on both sides seem more willing to compromise now.
This could implicitly mean that the KRG continues to expand its oil exports through Turkey, cutting into the monopoly of Iraq’s SOMO oil company, while Baghdad increasingly turns a blind eye as it is unable to pay back some $15 billion in overdue wages to the KRG.
