ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Members of the Kirkuk Provincial Council said on Tuesday that 20 percent of civil servant salary cuts done by the Iraqi government should be allocated to the Kurdish Peshmerga forces. This provincial decision comes in response to a decree by the central government in mid-January that all civil servant salaries will be cut by 3 percent which will go towards funding the Shiite militia known as Hashd al-Shaabi. "In our meeting today it was decided that 20 percent of civil servants' salaries cut by Baghdad must go to the Peshmerga, not all the benefit to Hashd al-Shaabi," Almas Fadhil Agha, head of the Kirkuk Provincial Council, told Rudaw. The federal government has some 80,000 employees in Kirkuk. The Kurdish Peshmerga have been in charge of Kirkuk’s protection against the threat posed by the Islamic State (ISIS) and they maintain hundreds of miles of defense lines through the province. Agha stressed that they “decided to allocate 20 of the three percent [salary cuts] to go to the Peshmerga because 95 percent of the city is protected by them.” The Iraqi government has also decreed that 40 percent of the cuts must go to Internally Displaced Families (IDPs) in Iraq.
