“It is trying to exert its dominance and control over the entire [Kurdish] region and punish it through the budget, which it spent the last three years writing,” she said.
She criticized “decisions taken through a majority in the Iraqi parliament rather than the principle of reaching an agreement over issues concerning the Kurds,” adding that the problems would get worse if the draft budget is not re-examined.
The Kurdish regional parliament on Nov. 5 issued a statement urging the Iraqi Cabinet not to vote on the draft budget, as it had been “prepared unilaterally by the Iraqi Finance Ministry without the participation of the KRG, in violation of Law 95 of 2014 and Articles 105, 106 and 121 of the Iraqi Constitution, which guarantee the Kurdish region a fair role in federal institutions.”
The Kurdish government confirmed that “the amount allocated for public servants’ salaries in the KRG, compared to the amount allocated under the biometric system, is very small — not even enough to pay the salaries of one province of the Kurdish region.”
Other political actors, such as the National Wisdom Movement led by Ammar al-Hakim, say the method of distributing the budget to Iraq’s various regions is unfair. They have backed the idea of distributing it to Iraqi Kurdistan provinces on the basis of “regular governorates in the region” rather than via the Kurdish government.
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