January 15, 2023
Baghdad / Obelisk: The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan boycotts the meetings that bring it together with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, accusing the party of monopolizing the authority of the region.
The greater the differences, the more Sulaymaniyah threatened to secede from Erbil.
The Democratic Party accuses the Union Party of having handed over the imports of border crossings and government departments, estimated at $100 million per month, to the treasury of the Kurdistan Regional Government.
But the imports of wealth, oil, border crossings, and oil companies do not push the two parties to the point of fighting, because they will lose all that money, according to observers.
Parties in the Democratic Party also recognize that the threat of Sulaymaniyah to secede with Halabja to form an independent region is blackmail for the purpose of obtaining more gains.
And the leader of the party, Mahdi Abdul Karim, says that there are external and even internal parties that have been working for a long time to create a division within the Kurdistan region in order to weaken it, and for this we have not and will not allow any step towards the separation of Sulaymaniyah and Halabja from the region.
And the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, Rebin Salam, explains that the threat or talk regarding separating Sulaymaniyah and Halabja from the Kurdistan region is just political pressure.
And the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Pavel Talabani, had announced in a televised interview that Erbil would lose, like Sulaymaniyah, if not more than it, in the event of fragmentation and division into two administrations, because it does not have gas and its oil ends.
Talabani pointed out that he sees the existence of a kind of two administrations and two authorities in the region between Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, and stressed the existence of clear discrimination practiced once morest the areas of influence of the Patriotic Union.
The differences reached their climax, following Jaafar Sheikh Mustafa, the deputy president of the Kurdistan region and a prominent leader in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, accused the Democratic Party and the regional government of controlling the region’s revenues from oil and border crossings.
Before 2003, there was a system of two administrations in the Kurdistan region, the first in Erbil under the administration of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and the second in Sulaymaniyah and its outskirts under the administration of the Patriotic Union, before it was unified into one administration headed by Massoud Barzani.
And the academic Abd al-Rahim Zebari talks regarding that the attempt to secede the province of Sulaymaniyah from the Kurdistan region of Iraq is not a constitutional right, as it is a province in an existing constitutional region, and this right is granted only to the provinces that are not organized in a region, alluding to the need to amend the constitution of Iraq.
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