“Due to the delay of salaries, some of our employees have gone on strike,” Aso Mohammed, the head of Sulaimani’s general traffic directorate told Rudaw’s Soran Hussein, “we do not know what this will lead to; so we advise citizens not to visit the directorate.”
The Iraqi Federal Supreme Court in February transferred the responsibility of paying Kurdistan Region civil servants from Erbil to Baghdad, following the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) failure to distribute the wages on time and in full, as well as multiple loans from the Iraqi federal government to cover those needs.
Iraq’s finance ministry has transferred around 560 billion dinars to the KRG’s bank account since March 11 to pay the monthly salaries of the Region’s employees, but the wages are yet to be distributed. The KRG’s finance ministry has said that it needs around 950 billion dinars per month to pay civil servant salaries.
Teachers in Sulaimani and Halabja provinces went on strike over unpaid wages in September, and only fully returned in March following promises from government officials to meet their demands.
Kurdistan Region civil servants were only paid nine monthly salaries in 2023, and have only been paid salaries for January since the start of the new year.
