Sulaimaniyah scene of power struggle among Iraqi Kurdish parties
Infighting and growing polarization between leaders in Erbil and Sulaimaniyah have raised concerns about the unity of Iraqi Kurdistan.
On Nov. 11, Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Massoud Barzani warned against dividing Iraqi Kurdistan, asserting that administratively separating Sulaimaniyah province from the rest of the region constitutes a “red line.” Barzani's warning was elicited by the fracture in Sulaimaniyah between the Movement for Change (Gorran), led by Nawshirwan Mustafa, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), led by ailing Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who remains abroad for medical treatment.
On the surface, the conflict revolves around the demand by the Movement for Change that the PUK governor of Sulaimaniyah, Bahrouz Mohammed Saleh, be replaced by one of its own members. The movement's primary argument for such a change is that the current governor is unelected — he was appointed in an acting capacity by the KRG government with the PUK's blessing — and that it came in second in the legislative elections held on Sept. 21, behind the Barzani-led Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) but ahead of the PUK, which in Talabani's absence has suffered a decline in popularity. The Movement for Change believes that Barzani and Talabani are purposely impeding local elections in the region for fear of losing ground to the movement.
The KRG responded to the movement's demand by asserting that Saleh's appointment was legitimate since the PUK had garnered the majority of votes in Sulaimaniyah in the last local council elections, held in 2005. The conflict's roots, however, run deeper than who occupies the governership of Sulaimaniyah. Rather, it involves the opposing views about the future of Iraqi Kurdistan held by the various political parties. The reality is that there has long been talk of forming a “Sulaimaniyah region” administratively independent from Erbil.
This sort of talk, including in the media, will not lead to positive developments in relations among the Kurdish parties, but could instead drag them back to the way things stood between KDP-controlled Erbil and PUK-controlled Sulaimaniyah in the 1990s, when a civil war raged between the Barzani and Talabani camps. After that, the two sides agreed to independently and autonomously administer these cities and environs, a situation that continued until the two administrations were unified under the KRG at the beginning of 2006.
