Kurdish Region 'Lagging Behind Baghdad'

Then again, many in Iraqi Kurdistan may not consider this much of a threat. There have already been plenty of complaints that Baghdad has not sent the right amount of the federal budget – the Iraqi Kurdish are supposed to get a 17 percent share of it – or not enough. Civil servants in Iraqi Kurdistan haven't been paid for several months, government institutions have had to reduce their spending and various projects have been stalled.

Interestingly some Iraqi Kurdish MPs in Baghdad agree with Hilali – they also believe that Iraqi Kurdistan should put some reforms into effect.

“If Iraqi Kurdistan does not undertake reform, there will be even greater risks,” says Bakhtiar Shawis, an MP with what is arguably Iraqi Kurdistan's most powerful party, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, who is also an MP in the federal Parliament in Baghdad. Shawis believes that Iraqi Kurdistan has already been badly affected by the current financial crisis and that this will only worsen if reforms are not made.

Just because there has been no announcement doesn't mean that there are no reforms, Safeen Dizayee, the spokesperson for the government of semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, told NIQASH.

“The reforms we are implementing in the Kurdish region are not a direct copy of those in Baghdad,” Dizayee explained. “That is despite the fact that we value and appreciate al-Abadi's reforms.”

The Iraqi Kurdish reforms are being carried out on an office-by-office and ministry-by-ministry basis and they are more general, he says. “And reforms are more than just removing a few people from their jobs,” Dizayee adds, in what seems to be a veiled reference to the fact that, while the government in Baghdad has managed to remove some key politicians from their positions, other reforms have stalled.