“We received an official approval from Baghdad,” Amanj Rahim, secretary of the KRG Council of Ministers, announced on Thursday.
According to a letter dated August 9, seen by Rudaw, the Iraqi interior ministry has authorized the opening of federal government offices in the province.
Halabja obtained provincial status from Baghdad in December 2013, but in practice it has remained administratively tied to Sulaimani.
The interior minister’s office has also sent a letter to the federal police authority to allow Halabja to issue its own vehicle number plates and to open a passport and citizenship office.
Earlier this month, a delegation from the Halabja provincial authority, headed by Ali Usman, visited Baghdad and met with Iraqi Interior Minister Qasim al-Araji.
“After the visit to Baghdad, we managed to receive the approval for the opening of Halabja province’s federal departments.”
He described the Baghdad decree as “historic”.
In a special Kurdistan Region parliamentary session convened on February 5, 2015 in Halabja, the Kurdish parliament approved a bill to change Halabja to a province, the fourth in the Kurdistan Region and the 19th in Iraq.
Halabja, 110 kilometers south of Sulaimani, became an international icon for Saddam Hussein’s murderous campaign against Iraq’s Kurds when his forces attacked the city with chemical bombs in March 1988, killing an estimated 5,000, many of them women and children.
Halabja, with a total population of 337,000, had been a district of Sulaimani, where it had had two representatives on the provincial council.
The Kurdish parliament named Halabja the capital of peace in September 2014 for its sacrifices for the Kurdish cause.
The first decision to turn Halabja into a province by the Kurdish parliament was in 1999, but practical steps started to emerge only in December 2013 after the Iraqi Council of Ministers approved a bill – proposed by the KRG – to put the matter before the Iraqi parliament for approval. The Iraqi parliament seemed reluctant, but then House Speaker Osama Nujaifi instructed that it was within the power of the KRG to name the city a province.
