Al-Kadhimi calls for a "Radical Agreement" with the Kurdistan Region
Shafaq News/ The Iraqi Prime Minister, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, called on Monday for a radical agreement that puts disputes with Kurdistan Region to an end.
Al-Kadhimi said in a statement, "I call for a genuine national dialogue to reach a final agreement to the relation between the Central government and Kurdistan Region that maintains the unity of the lands and radically settles the differences."
As Iraq seeks to manage its worst fiscal crisis in almost three decades, tensions between the federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) are once again on the rise. Not for the first time, the dispute is over Baghdad’s conditions for the transfer of budget funds to the KRG in Erbil.
At its heart, the battle is constitutional. Ever since Saddam Hussein’s regime was ousted in 2003, there has been disagreement over how political power should be shared. On finances, hydrocarbons, defense, and an array of other issues, the two governments have not reached an agreement on the margins of competent authority.
The former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi’s Iraqi caretaker government ordered cut federal budget contributions to the Kurdistan Regional Government, pushing the KRG toward bankruptcy and cutting off the payment of salaries to its civil servants.
Abdul Mahdi’s government said the step was taken due to the international oil decline that has hit Iraq hard as well as Erbil’s failure to submit 250,000 barrels of oil per day to Iraq’s State Organization for Marketing of Oil (SOMO) in return for public funding under Iraq’s 2019 budget law.
