The complaints have been filed by Safwat Salih and Najah al-Tai, both candidates for the upcoming elections in Kirkuk, urging the top court to issue a ruling to move the date of the vote in Kirkuk until the province’s electoral registry is carefully examined.
The Arab and Turkmen parties of Kirkuk have accused the Kurdish component of misrepresenting the demographics of Kirkuk while in charge of the province prior to 2017, claiming to have verified the presence of nearly 300,000 voters in the electoral registry who are from outside of the province, with some even being from outside of Iraq.
Sabah Habib, a Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) member in the Iraqi parliament, said that he does not expect the elections to be postponed in Kirkuk as most of Iraq’s ruling parties are opposed to the suggestion.
“The complaint will not have any results and will not affect the province’s elections in any way, as the majority of the parties in the State Administration Coalition, the Coordination Framework, the Kurdish parties, and even the prime minister himself agree that the elections need to be held in Kirkuk and not postponed,” Habib told Rudaw’s Hemin Baban on Monday.
Iraq will hold provincial council elections on December 18 for the first time since 2013. While the vote will not be held in the provinces of the Kurdistan Region, they are viewed by Kurdish parties as an opportunity to regain a foothold in strategic Kirkuk.
There are 15 seats in Kirkuk’s provincial council and one minority quota seat.
Kirkuk is a multi-ethnic city home to Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen. The city was under joint administration before 2014, when Kurds took full control after Iraqi forces withdrew in the face of the Islamic State (ISIS) group. Kurds held the city until October 16, 2017, when Iraqi forces retook control and expelled Kurdish security forces following the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) independence referendum.
