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The eleven reasons to explain Barzani’s decision of Kurdistan Region self-determination (and the backfire)

Not only bad tim­ing, but Barzani’s “Kurds self-determination” argu­ment in the Con­fer­ence of the Kur­dis­tan Demo­c­ra­tic Party started to back­fire, and the result is an agree­ment between Allawi and Maliki (among other rea­sons, such as Muq­tada Al-Sadr to trans­form Iraq to an Islamic State, there are reports say that the Lebanese Hizbollah’s mem­bers granted the Iraqi nation­al­ity). Signs show that Maliki started to ignore the Kur­dis­tan Alliance’s con­di­tions to sup­port his sec­ond term (accord­ing to Al-Qabas, the Kur­dis­tan Alliance renewed the call on Maliki to sign the con­di­tions). The agree­ment between Maliki and Allawi on the mech­a­nism to lift the De-Baathification ban on the four of Al-Iraqi lead­ers is already reported on the Iraqi media since three days ago (it …

The Council of the Strategic Policy, debates and objections

Update Al-Sumeria just released the last ver­sion of the draft doc­u­ment, which (accord­ing to the TV chan­nel) will be dis­cussed in the par­lia­ment. .….…… No time to trans­late the whole text of form­ing the National Coun­cil for the strate­gic pol­icy law drafted by Al-Iraqiya, but I hint to its few arti­cles below. Al-Iraqiya List insists that the Par­lia­ment must approve the Coun­cil law before pro­ceed­ing to form the government’s cab­i­net, which means that Al-Iraqiya wants, first of all, to legit­imize the work of the coun­cil that is no less impor­tant than the the three pres­i­den­cies. It is expected that this issue will raise a rejec­tion from the “National Alliance”, [already for­mally rejected the draft law How­ever, sources in Al-Iraqiya, said that …

Iraq’s politics made easy: Who is Turkey’s man in the new government?

Some update first: Despite the con­fu­sion about the De-Baathfication Law reported by Aljazeera, It seems Maliki man­aged to attract Mut­laq his side, but he allied him­self with Maliki, as reported by Kuwaiti media today (image above) A deal between Maliki and Salih Al-Mutlaq, to with­draw Mutlaq’s name from the De-Baathification Law allow­ing him to receive impor­tant gov­ern­ment office, in exchange that Mut­laq to leave Al-Iraqiya List (Izzat Al-Shahbandar, Maliki’s adviser is the one who orches­trated the new rela­tion between Maliki and Mut­laq). Per­son­ally, I don’t think Mut­laq can leave Al-Iraqiya offi­cially, but we will see more coop­er­a­tion between him and Maliki in the future. Who is Turkey’s man in the new gov­ern­ment? There is some kind of con­tra­dic­tion between the …

Winners, losers and lost momentum

From the many arti­cles I read today (mostly on the west­ern media), all came to one con­clu­sion: Maliki is the win­ner, and the Kurds lost heav­ily with one pres­i­den­tial office. In my opin­ion it is the other way around, Kurds gained enor­mously, and the future Maliki is weak and help­less Prime Min­is­ter, this is why: The Kurds First impres­sion, the Kurds didn’t achieve much except the pow­er­less office of the pres­i­dent, but look deeper and see what Barzani achieved. Seen before as a tribal war­lord, Barzani emerged from the cri­sis as a new “promis­ing” leader, not only region­ally but even inter­na­tion­ally (NATO nom­i­nated Barzani for the peace prize). This is what Al-Quds Al-Arabi wrote today: Kurds achieved a sig­nif­i­cant share of this …

The creation of the Sectarian Maliki(te) Republic of Iraq

Maliki chal­lenged his inter­nal and exter­nal rivals threat­ened that he will top­ple them all tomor­row in the par­lia­ment, con­sid­er­ing tomor­row, as not only the date of the for­ma­tion of his gov­ern­ment but also the cre­ation of the Iraqi state, which had been founded by the late King Faisal the First, eighty year before Maliki. Maliki has can­celed eighty years of his­tory (because for­mer kings and pres­i­dents are Sun­nis?), impos­ing a “fait accom­pli”, a semi-coup led by the Dawa party and the Sadrists on the Iraqi par­lia­men­tary. Maliki said in a con­fer­ence held in Bagh­dad with his allies the Sadrists : “Thurs­day will be the begin­ning of the found­ing of the Iraqi state and not only the Iraqi gov­ern­ment,”. Adding : …

Scenes from Irbil meeting – going to Saudi Arabia

Update Allawi’s with­drawal and Hashimi’s absence from today’s meet­ing in Bagh­dad con­firm what I wrote below yes­ter­day. Another update Al-Hakim and Adil Abd Al-Mahdi both with­draw from the meet­ing. 1– The emer­gence of a sharp line between those who want to dis­cuss the cur­rent issues (the points I already reported in a pre­vi­ous post) before the for­ma­tion of gov­ern­ment, and those who want to solve all the issues after the for­ma­tion of the gov­ern­ment. Tariq Al-Hashimi for exam­ple com­plained about the com­plex­ity of the agenda of the meet­ing — which is a hint to the need to go to Saudi Ara­bia to pass the Saudi ini­tia­tive and this is part of Al-Iraqiya effort to “plun­der” the meet­ing. Maliki seems in …

The Saudi initiative has succeeded to split Maliki’s coalition allies

Kur­dis­tan Alliance and the Sadrists to sup­port its ini­tia­tive (which is called by the Arab media “Iraqi-Taif). A new sit­u­a­tion will con­fuse the “State of Law” coali­tion and Maliki, who wants to form a polit­i­cal major­ity gov­ern­ment and not a national part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment. An issue rejected by the Supreme Coun­cil and the Kur­d­dish Alliance ’till today. The short his­tory of the Saudi ini­tia­tive August the 19th 2010, leaked infor­ma­tion pub­lished on the Saudi funded news­pa­per Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, under the title “Source: An Iraqi-Taif Iraq in Syria sup­ported by Turkey and the Arabs”: The idea of the meet­ing is a Turkish-Arabs ini­tia­tive, par­tic­u­larly Saudi Ara­bia … Lebanese news­pa­per Al-Diyar added the fol­low­ing: The Iraq-Al-Taif is sup­ported by Saudi Ara­bia, the Gulf States, …

Iraq Church Standoff, is “Al-Qaeda“‘s answer to Pope Benedict’s synod statement

We don’t need to men­tion the lies of the Iraqi-American forces, start­ing by the “Bagh­dad Oper­a­tions Com­mand” claimed that the num­ber of the hostages are no more than twenty peo­ple, while the hostages con­tacted the media by mobile phones from inside the church said that they are more than fifty. That the joint Iraqi-US forces man­aged to kill the seven mil­i­tants and free all the hostages, or the Iraqi mil­i­tary spokesman, who claimed that the mil­i­tant are thieves took refuge in the Church [Al Qaeda behind Bagh­dad church hostage-taking] and [Arch­bishop of Bagh­dad: the attack on the Church is pre-planned] The synod state­ment issued by Pope Bene­dict XVI few days ago [full text, note: the con­fer­ence is crit­i­cized by Israel, see: …

How to exclude the Sunnis? Maliki’s path to the Prime Minister office

Cur­rent devel­op­ment on the Kur­dis­tan Alliance-Iraqiya List pushed Maliki to post­pone his inter­view with the offi­cial Iraqi TV two days giv­ing the incum­bent Prime Min­is­ter the time to adjust his words, accord­ing to the fail­ure of Allawi and Adil Abdul-Mahdi nego­ti­a­tions with the Kur­dis­tan Alliance, which came as a relief for the “Sadrists”, and the “State of Law” leader Al-Maliki. Accord­ing to the last infor­ma­tion, and after the last meet­ing held between Barzani and Tal­a­bani, Kur­dish lead­ers had decided their final posi­tion in favor of Al-Maliki. Exter­nal and inter­nal rea­sons behind the Kur­dis­tan Alliance deci­sion: Maliki was able to per­suade the Kurds to resolve the dif­fer­ences between Bagh­dad and Irbil, while Al-Iraqiya’s nego­ti­a­tion with the Kur­dis­tan Alliance focused on its …

The “Round-Table” results

It became clear that each bloc has its own under­stand­ing of the mean­ing of the “Round Table”. Al-Iraqiya sees this table as an oppor­tu­nity to form “all coali­tions” partnership-government con­tains all coali­tions, includ­ing the “State of Law”, but with­out the Al-Maliki. The National Alliance’s under­stand­ing of the “Round-Table” term depends on the polit­i­cal blocs within this coali­tion, Maliki for exam­ple sees the for­ma­tion of the gov­ern­ment must move for­ward, even with­out Iraqiya List. The Kur­dis­tan Alliance tends to form the Gov­ern­ment with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of all other coali­tions. The Kurds don’t want to mar­gin­al­ize Al-Iraqiya because of the dis­puted areas in Kirkuk and Mosul. With all these dif­fer­ences, leaked infor­ma­tion from Irbil’s meet­ings con­firmed the birth of semi-agreement accord­ing to this …


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