Iraq prime minister visits Kurdish north to melt ice

BAGHDAD: Iraq’s Prime Minister yesterday made a rare visit to the country’s self-ruled northern Kurdish region in a bid to melt the ice between the Kurds and the Shiite-led central government in Baghdad, as a suicide attack in Baghdad claimed the lives of seven people.
Nuri Al-Maliki held a Cabinet meeting in Irbil — the first in the Kurdish regional capital since the 2003 US-led invasion — as part of an initiative started last year to better understand the needs of the provinces. Al-Maliki and government ministers arrived by military plane, where they were received on a red carpet by the region’s president, Massoud Barzani.
Barzani leads the Kurds’ largely autonomous and increasingly prosperous northern region, which has multiple government ministries, its own security forces and other trappings of an independent state. It remains part of Iraq, however, and relies heavily on a share of the federal budget controlled by Baghdad to meet its budget needs.
Arguments over dueling claims to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and other disputed territories running along the Kurdish region’s border with the rest of Iraq are one of the most serious threats to Iraq’s stability. An exchange of fire in one disputed city in November led both sides to send military reinforcements and heavy weapons into the contested area.
Iraq’s state TV aired part of the meeting as Al-Maliki was calling on Iraqis to come together so that they can face what he called “the danger” brought on by regional unrest mainly in neighboring Syria.
“The region is going through a new strong storm, a sectarian storm, a storm of political challenges and a storm of confusions in many countries in the region based on different reasons,” Al-Maliki said. “The most dangerous one is the comeback of the extremist organizations like Al-Qaeda and Jabhat Al-Nusra and others who are backed by (hard-line clerics’) fatwas,” he added.
“That has brought back the ghost of the killing not only to Iraq but to the region and as Iraq is part of the region and part of its fabric general and that we started to be affected by the storm the region is going through,” he said.
Shortly before Al-Maliki landed in Irbil, a car bomber rammed his explosives-laden vehicle into an Iraqi army checkpoint in a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, killing at least seven people and wounding 18 others, officials said.