Osman pointed out that during his recent visit to Sulaimaniyah on March 7, Abadi promised that the PUK demands would be met. Changes on the ground are yet to materialize.
The new agreement stipulates that the PUK will abandon its threat to close the pipeline after the Iraqi government increases the production capacity of the Kirkuk oil refinery to 40,000 barrels per day. However, the crisis will not stop at this point, given the historical conflict between the Kurdish PUK and Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) over control of the Kurdish region territory and its resources, according to Ihsan al-Shammari, a political science professor at the University of Baghdad.
Shammari added, “The real dispute is between the Kurdish parties, not with Baghdad, which has concluded an agreement to solve the Kirkuk oil issue with the Kurdish government in Erbil [controlled by the KDP led by Massoud Barzani]. With the [coming] end of the war with the Islamic State, differences began to surface more clearly.”
He added, “The political crisis in the Kurdistan region is preventing the Kurdish parties from taking a unified position on the outstanding issues with Baghdad, particularly with regard to the disputed regions, oil and the general budget.”
The crisis experienced by the region since 2015 can be boiled down to the constitutional vacuum that was created with the end of Barzani’s mandate, the fact that new presidential elections have not been held and the paralyzing of the Kurdistan parliament, which led to a major political dispute between the KDP (Erbil) on the one hand and the PUK and the Movement for Change (in Sulaimaniyah) on the other. The conflict is still going on.
Shammari did not rule out that political parties in Baghdad can be quick to take advantage of the internal Kurdish differences. He is also expecting there to be conflicts not relating to oil but to the management of the areas liberated from the Islamic State (IS).
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