CENTRAL NEWS
Videos circulated on social media that appeared to show protesters setting fire to the local offices of several political parties, including the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the Change Movement (Gorran), the Kurdistan Islamic Group (KIG), and the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU).
One of the videos also appeared to show a young man who had been shot. The young man died in the hospital he was admitted to as a results of his injuries.
In Chamchamal and Takiya, protesters blocked Kirkuk-Sulaimani highway.
The Kurdistan Region Security Council said in a statement that the security forces have been given absolute power to implement their “legal duties”.
The latest round of mass protests began on Wednesday when thousands of civil servants, teachers, and local residents gathered in Sulaimani’s main bazaar to voice their anger about the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) handling of deteriorating economic conditions and its failure to pay public sector salaries in full or on time.
A second day of protests in the city on Thursday was broken up by the local security forces, which left in at least 25 people wounded.
On Sunday, protesters in Piramagrun sub-district, northwest of Sulaimani city, blocked the Dukan-Sulaimani highway for the second day in a row. During the demonstration, protesters set fire to the local headquarters of the PUK and gathered at the KDP offices.
WHAT HAPPENED?
According to Iraqi state-run newspaper al-Sabah, the KRG and the federal government have reached a “fundamental agreement” regarding the provision of the public sector salaries in the Kurdistan Region. As part of the agreement, the KRG is supposed to submit 250,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd) to the federal State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO) along with half of the revenues collected at the border crossings. In return, it will receive a 12.67 budget share, which amounts to an expected 900 billion dinars ($756 million) per month.
A similar agreement had been reached before but was voided after the KRG failed to deliver the barrels of oils it agreed to submit. In April, the federal government of Iraq cut off all budget transfers to the KRG after the latter failed to send any of the 250,000 barrels of oil per day that it was required to under the 2019 Federal Budget Law. After failing to pay civil servants and failing to submit oil, the Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani admitted for the first time that the Region had made an energy deal with Turkey for 50 years.
The deal between the Kurdish party and Turkey was described by the KRG as “the best choice” the KRG’s eighth cabinet took at the time to resolve its economic crisis. Though the details of the agreement were not shared, it is assumed that the dirty alliance formed between the anti-Kurd Turkish state and its Kurdish counterpart, was formed on the basis of personal interests to the Barzani dynasty which has plagued the region with corruptness.
Though several officials of the KDP have since claimed that the oil-shortages in the deal with Iraq are independent of the new deal with the Anti-Kurd Erdogan regime, it has become evident with the KRG’s attempts to otherwise source funds that the Iraq-agreement was breached for Turkish relations.
On November 18, thirty-two Kurdistan Parliament’s lawmakers signed a petition calling on the parliament’s presidency to explain Barzani’s remark about the Turkey-KRG deal being the best choice to have been taken.
KRG paid the last salary on October 15 with an eighteen percent tax cut, while salaries paid in July and August were taxed by twenty-one percent.
