Leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan say Baghdad has accelerated the erosion of the Kurdistan region’s autonomy due to the increasing monopoly on power by the Shia ruling elites that control the government, the parliament, the judiciary and the security forces in Iraq.
Masoud Barzani, the powerful leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), has decried that “democracy in Iraq is under threat.” He told the French station Radio Monte Carlo in an interview last week that abandoning communal consensus could drive Iraq to “the abyss.”
Barzani voiced his concerns about the region’s future after recent decisions made by the Iraqi High Federal Court (HFC) restricting the government of the region’s powers and its authority over running the northern enclave’s affairs.
To emphasise Iraqi Kurdistan’s fear of losing control to Baghdad, Barzani’s son Masrour, who is the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) prime minister, travelled to the US last week to seek support and protection from the Biden administration.
In Washington, Barzani junior met with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and several of their aides and held lengthy discussions with the Pentagon and Treasury officials and senior members of Congress.
Although the talks with the US officials remained private, a KRG statement said Masrour Barzani and Blinken had discussed “protecting the security of the Kurdistan Region, resolving the budget issues with Baghdad, providing the financial entitlements and constitutional rights of the Kurdish people, and respecting the federal system and the constitutional structure of the region.”
A State Department transcript of the discussions quoted Blinken as underscoring “the importance of the US partnership with the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR) in the context of their mutual, enduring commitment to regional security and their shared values, including good governance and respect for human rights.”
The tensions came following the HFC ruling on 21 February that struck down several articles of the Kurdistan Region’s election law including the allocation of seats in the Kurdistan Parliament to minorities and women and declared the Region multiple constituencies.
The court also ruled that Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) will replace the Kurdistan Region’s electoral commission to manage the region’s elections, virtually banning the Regional Parliament from activating the regional electoral commission which was made up of local officials.
In another ruling, the court mandated the KRG’s Finance Ministry to submit a breakdown of the monthly budget for the salaries of the region’s employees to the Federal Ministry of Finance, a long-standing demand by Baghdad which claims irregularities in pay rolls.
At the heart of the issue is the KRG’s shares in oil revenues and its civil servant salaries after the HFC ruled that the KRG must hand over all oil and non-oil revenues to Baghdad. Under the verdict, the KRG must transfer the responsibility of paying the Kurdistan Region’s civil servants from Erbil to Baghdad.
Recent events surrounding the US troops in Iraq also present another important development to Baghdad and the KRG, raising numerous questions about a potential flashpoint if the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shiaa Al-Sudani presses ahead with plans to ask for the troops’ exit.
Tensions between the US and the Iraqi government have deepened in recent months after Washington carried out strikes against Shia militias in Iraq in response to a flurry of attacks on US-led troops since the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza began in October.
Baghdad has recently requested the renegotiation of the presence of US troops in the country as part of the Coalition to Defeat the Islamic State (IS) in response to an Iraqi government request after the terror group seized a large swathe of Iraq’s territory in 2014.
The KRG leadership has publicly expressed a desire for the US troops to stay. During his trip to Washington, Masrour Barzani asked for Kurdish participation in the military talks of the US-Iraq Higher Military Commission, which is negotiating the troops’ issue.
Disagreements between Baghdad and the KRG are not a new phenomenon. The post-2003 power-sharing architecture in Iraq has failed to narrow the gap between the majority Shia-led central government and the rest of the country’s communities.
The essence of the problems lies in different interpretations of the federal system that was introduced by the US Occupation Authority without initiating an appropriate programme for state and nation-building for the post-Saddam era in Iraq.
The post-US invasion constitution established Iraq as a federal state with a vague system of power-sharing based mostly on the discretion of the regional and local authorities and the central government, which retains overall sovereign powers such as territorial sovereignty, natural resources, and security issues and revenue and budget-sharing arrangements.
But the KRG leadership has always worked on the premise of two systems in one country and resisted diminished autonomy from Baghdad. It has resorted to projecting its autonomous power in order to outmanoeuvre Baghdad into giving concessions on many sovereign issues such as exporting oil unilaterally.
Worse still, the KRG leaders have entertained the dangerous illusion of the region’s independence from Iraq, ignoring their constitutional commitment to Iraq’s national unity and all the other geopolitical constraints in the way.
The situation worsened after September 2017, when the KRG organised a referendum on self-determination, grossly misjudging the Baghdad government’s unwavering opposition and the degree of regional and international support it could receive.
Relationships between Baghdad and the KRG have since taken a dive, forcing the latter to resort to delicate diplomacy in order to resolve outstanding disputes with occasional bickering over Baghdad’s attempts to claw back Kurdistan’s privileges.
Masrour Barzani’s trip to Washington was an attempt to make a desperate plea for the Biden administration, the Congress, and the US authorities to support the autonomous Kurdistan Region against the Iran-backed Baghdad government.
Reports about Barzani junior’s visit in the KRG-sponsored media suggest that he tried hard with backing from several Washington public relations firms and consultants to lobby his American hosts into thinking that the KRG is a suitable partner in the on-going dispute over the troop withdrawal and in the long term to maintain US influence in Iraq.
But Masrour, a US-educated former head of the KRG’s Intelligence Service, is certainly risking taking support from Washington for granted on the assumption that the US could be the Iraqi Kurds’ saviour.
Of course, there are some practical calculations that the US troops have nowhere else to go except Kurdistan if Al-Sudani’s government insists on their withdrawal, which Erbil thinks could irrevocably affect Baghdad’s relationship with Washington.
Nevertheless, it could be an historic mistake by the KRG to invest hopes in a superpower that has repeatedly betrayed the Kurds in the past after supporting their insurrections against Baghdad.
The Kurds bitterly remember the first abandonment, when the allies failed to help them create an independent state following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.
One of the best-known episodes of the betrayal of Kurds was the US sellout of their revolt against former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in 1975 following a deal brokered by Henry Kissinger, then US secretary of state and National Security adviser, with Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi of Iran over the latter’s claims to the Shatt Al-Arab waterway.
Looking back seven years on, the US also rejected the KRG referendum for independence, which it believed was a blow to its efforts to hold Iraq together after its devastating invasion in 2003.
Earlier, US president Barack Obama allowed the Iraqi security forces to take back the oil-rich province of Kirkuk from Kurdish control and turned the tables on the Kurds’ ambitions for a larger Kurdistan.
Masrour Barzani may have turned up the volume during his tour of Washington’s corridors of power last week. But if history has taught the Kurds any lesson, it is that lobbying for US goodwill cannot supplant reality, which dictates that the stability of the relationship with Iraq is of major strategic importance to the US in ensuring its interests in the Middle East region.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 March, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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