ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Baghdad has agreed to continue sending 320 billion dinars (around $268 million) a month to Erbil to cover half of Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) employee salary payments until either the end of 2020 or when Iraqi parliament approves a 2021 budget, a senior KRG official told Rudaw's Sangar Abdulrahman.
The official, who spoke to Rudaw on the condition of anonymity, will be a member of a high-level KRG delegation set to visit Baghdad this week.
"The KRG will receive 320 billion Iraqi dinars from Baghdad until the end of this year,” the Kurdish official told Rudaw on Saturday.
“If Baghdad approves the 2021 budget and includes the KRG's share, then the 320 billion will be stopped and the KRG will instead start to receive its agreed share of the 2021 budget,” he added.
Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region Masrour Barzani and Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi announced last month that they had reached a temporary deal, in which Baghdad would send Erbil 320 billion dinars a month so that the KRG could pay its civil servants for August, September, and October.
Before the August agreement between premiers Barzani and Kadhimi, Baghdad had not sent funds since April, worsening the KRG's failure to pay complete and full public sector employee salaries this year.
KRG public sector employees have taken to the streets over delays in salary payments. Demonstrations and strikes calling on the KRG's current cabinet to resign have occurred several times in Sulaimani province, while protests by teachers over delayed pay in Duhok in May were shut down.
The delegation will be looking for a "once and for all" budget agreement when it visits the federal government in Baghdad this week to secure the Kurdish share in Iraq's 2021 budget draft, Faris Issa, KRG representative to Baghdad told Rudaw on Saturday.
Erbil and Baghdad have met multiple times to resolve budget disagreements to little avail, each blaming the other in a public war of words.
Sherwan Dubardani, a Kurdish MP in Iraqi parliament told Iraqi state media on Sunday that political tensions between Erbil and Baghdad should not affect salary payments for Kurdistan Region public servants.
“We hope, through the [KRG] delegation’s visit, to reach an agreement in order to fix the provision of the KRG’s federal budget share and entitlements, so that these problems do not reoccur, and that the issue of the budget and employees’ salaries in the Region will in the future be kept apart from the political issues of the Region and the federal government,” Dubardani said.
Control of oil revenues has long been a thorny issue between Erbil and Baghdad. The KRG has operated an independent oil and gas sector since 2006 and later began exporting its oil to the international market via a pipeline through Turkey.
Years of tensions over the independent oil sales came to a head in 2014 when then-Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki suspended the Kurdistan Region’s share of the federal budget – leaving hundreds of thousands of public sector employees with unpaid salaries.
That same year, the Peshmerga took control of security in the disputed territory of Kirkuk, allowing the KRG to also seize control of the province’s bountiful oilfields.
When Iraqi forces retook the area in October 2017, the KRG lost around half of its oil revenues, compelling the government to suspend exports via Turkey for several months.
