Kurdistan presidency chief: Fruitful Baghdad visit was at US suggestion

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Kurdistan Region's presidential chief of staff revealed that a Kurdish delegation that travelled to Baghdad last week and secured a key oil agreement that brought "positive results" made the visit at the request of US officials.

“Our visit and meetings we had with Baghdad was upon a suggestion from the US Embassy in Iraq,” Dr. Fuad Hussein told Rudaw.

Hussein said that the delegation to Baghdad, headed by Kurdish Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani, had accrued "positive results,” as the US had suggested with it as it the American suggested such a visit by the KRG.

Regarding Erbil-Baghdad relations, Hussein said “the relations between Erbil and Baghdad are not entirely  severed. There are contacts between both sides. There are phone calls between the Kurdistan Region's President Masoud Barzani and the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi every week.”

Hussein explained the series of meeting in Baghdad, saying "the first meeting of the KRG delegation was held with the government, the second was with the Shiite national coalition and the third turned into meetings between both governments.”

President Barzani was happy with “our meetings in Baghdad,” he said.

Concerning the aftermath of the meetings, he claimed that “part of the meetings had good results. The result of some others will turn out in the future. Others, like oil, the result is apparent now as we talked about the export of oil from Kirkuk oilfields, which was stopped for five months.”

He went to say “now, 93,000 barrels of oil are being exported till it reaches 150,000 bpd, which is going to be sold by SOMO. The question of selling Kirkuk oil via Iran was rejected,” he said.