US, Iran and Turkey all getting involved in Kurdish presidency problem
The current Iraqi Kurdish presidency officially ended yesterday. Massoud Barzani, who heads the Kurdish Democratic Party, or KDP, has held the post for a decade now. For eight of those years he was a legally elected representative and for the past two he has served after his term was extended by the Iraqi Kurdish Parliament. Iraqi […]Honar Hama Rasheed writes for Niqash:
The current Iraqi Kurdish presidency officially ended yesterday. Massoud Barzani, who heads the Kurdish Democratic Party, or KDP, has held the post for a decade now. For eight of those years he was a legally elected representative and for the past two he has served after his term was extended by the Iraqi Kurdish Parliament. Iraqi Kurdistan is a semi-autonomous region in the north of Iraq and has its own borders, military and parliament and the Barzani family are in charge of many aspects of the region's system.
Despite this – or perhaps because of this - the issue of Barzani's ongoing presidency is an extremely sensitive one, not least because Iraqi Kurdistan purports to be a democracy. If Barzani stays in power, all those claims that Iraqi Kurdistan is actually his fiefdom or a sultanate will be hard to argue with. Politicians inside Iraqi Kurdistan are trying to resolve the issue. Other than Barzani's own KDP, one of the two most popular and powerful parties in the region, all other political actors want him to step down.
