The Turkish-Kurdish 'Secret Agreement'

“This is the only agreement that very few people know about and there is no doubt that a big number of officials in the Kurdistan region's government have no information whatsoever on this agreement,” MP Ali Hama Salih, a member of the anti-corruption Change movement and a senior member of the Kurdish Parliament's Energy and Natural Resources committee, told NIQASH. “Among them is the Minister of Finance, Rebaz Mohammad [Hamalan].”

“Our committee asked the executive to provide information about the agreement by way of a formal letter,” says Kurdish MP and economist Izzat Saber, who heads the local Parliament's Committee on Finance and Economics. “But up until now we have had no reply. During a meeting with the Oil and Gas Council we were informed that the agreement was valid for 50 years and it covered the oil and energy sectors as well as several others.”

Saber believes it is very important to make the content of the agreement public because of possible impact on future generations.

Information obtained by NIQASH via enquiries with a former senior official, in office until 2013, indicates that the agreement is composed of 13 points covering three main areas: peaceful relations with Turkey, Turkey's cooperation with Iraqi Kurdistan and oil and energy.

The agreement apparently stipulates that the Iraqi Kurdish government should play a positive role in bringing the Turkish government closer to the Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK, which has long been in violent conflict with Ankara. On the other side of the coin, Turkey apparently agrees to cooperate with Iraqi Kurdistan in several areas, and especially when the region is in danger. Allegedly there is also a paragraph that says Ankara will support Iraqi Kurdistan in conflicts between Iraqi Kurdistan and the federal Iraqi government in Baghdad.