Ex-Kirkuk governor Najmaldin Karim plans to run in 2020 election

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Kirkuk’s first provincial elections in 15 years are looking to be a hotly contested race as the province’s ousted Kurdish governor Najmaldin Karim declared his intent to run, separate from a coalition of Kurdistani parties that was announced Saturday.

"I have not backtracked from forming a list to run for the elections and we continue our efforts in this regard," Karim told Rudaw of his determination to stand in the April 2020 provincial election. 

He said that he was unaware of the main Kurdish parties meeting and forming a joint list for the vote in the disputed province. The main Kurdistan Region parties – Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), Change Movement (Gorran), and Islamic Group (Komal) – are part of the Kurdistani Coalition announced on Saturday.

Karim said the new coalition will not deter him from his plan to contest the election. 

Seventy-year-old Karim was a senior PUK figure and governor of Kirkuk for six years. The Iraqi government removed Karim from the post in October 2017 because of his decision to raise the Kurdistan flag in the city that is claimed by both Baghdad and Erbil and participate in the Kurdistan independence referendum. He maintains that the decision to fire him was illegal and he is still the governor of Kirkuk. 

Kirkuk returned to federal authority when Iraqi troops took control from the Kurdish Peshmerga on October 16, 2017. The city was a PUK stronghold and its loss split the party, with one faction accusing another of committing treason by handing the city over to Baghdad. Karim parted ways with the party over the dispute. 

Ethnically diverse Kirkuk is home to Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, and Christians. The province is rich in oil reserves and the federal and regional governments both claim ownership. It has not held provincial council elections since 2005, mainly due to its disputed nature and disagreements among the province's ethnic communities. Kurds dominated the 2005 vote, winning 26 out of a possible 41 seats in the provincial council when they ran on the joint Kurdistan Brotherhood List that also included some Turkmen parties.

Karim said his electoral list will bring together all the groups who call Kirkuk home and "will include Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, Chaldean, and Assyrian components."

His list will campaign on a call for “the Hashd al-Shaabi [Iraq’s paramilitaries known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, PMF] and the Iraqi army to withdraw from the city and return to their areas where they came from,” Karim explained. 

“There must be political freedoms” for all residents of Kirkuk, he said, adding that the situation has been “abnormal and complicated” since Iraqi forces took control in October 2017.

Karim is popular in Kirkuk and his electoral list could thwart the Kurdistani Coalition’s effort to unite the Kurdish vote. 

“We as Kurdistani parties met today to form a joint list for areas covered by Article 140 such as Kirkuk, Mosul, Nineveh, Diyala, and Saladin. We have all agreed to run as one list in order to prevent losses in Kurdish votes,” Kakamin Najar, a member of the KDP politburo, said in a joint press conference with other coalition members in Erbil on Saturday.

Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution was written to address the issue of lands disputed by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Erbil and the federal government in Baghdad. It calls for normalization of these areas, to be followed by a referendum on whether or not those regions want to be part of the Kurdistan Region. According to the constitution, the article should have been implemented by the end of 2007, yet so far no referendum has been conducted.