Kirkuk’s Governor: Major political reforms needed
The unusual salience of Kurds in international affairs these days is reflected in the unusual number of Kurdish political figures and delegations visiting Washington DC, as a new administration takes office.
Prominent among them is Dr. Najmaldin Karim, governor of Kirkuk province. Kurdistan24 met with the onetime neurosurgeon turned political leader in his native Kirkuk at the Kurdistan Regional Government’s diplomatic mission in the US capital.
During this visit, Karim has met with officials from the White House, State Department, and Congress. Based on those discussions, he told Kurdistan24 that he expected the Trump administration “to be more vigorous” in “getting rid” of the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.
He also said he expected the new administration to be more active “in resolving political issues” that remain “outstanding” and which caused ISIS to emerge in the first place—and as Karim noted, “before that al-Qaida and before that Ansar al-Sunna and all the terrorist groups” before them.
Will the defeat of IS merely produce one more such group several years hence? Karim believes that fundamental political change in Iraq is required.
“Reconciliation” is necessary,” he said. And reconciliation requires “true decentralization.”
“Forming regions in provinces that want to—like Anbar or Nineveh or Salahuddin or any other province—even in the south, the Shi’a provinces” should be permitted, the governor affirmed. “This is the constitution, and the constitution allows that.”
Karim explained, “The central government in Baghdad—and I call it central, because it’s still not really a federal government”—has a tendency “to discourage formation of regions and even to prevent that from happening.”
“It just helps better administration, better accountability,” Karim stated. He noted, “in countries where there is decentralization, there is progress, more stability, and more prosperity.”
Kurdistan24 asked whether the heart of the political problem was the issue of Sunni representation. “That’s very important,” Karim responded. “It looks like the Sunnis are not satisfied.”
He suggested that Sunni Arab politicians had neglected their constituents, at least those in the north of the country
“They did not address” the needs of those who were uprooted and displaced by IS. “And I’m a witness to that because I had about 600,000” of those people in Kirkuk province. “We rarely saw anybody, whether governors or parliamentarians come to help them.”
That is a sad indictment of Iraq’s political class, or at least the Sunni Arab leadership.
Hopefully, Karim is correct in his view that the new US administration understands the crucial importance of developing political changes to accompany the defeat of IS.
The Obama administration did not understand, or, perhaps, did not want to understand. It had a mantra for its policy. Virtually any question about their Iraq policy was answered, “We are following Baghdad’s lead.”
Of course, in the background, the US embassy may well have been working to influence Iraqi decisions and, probably, succeeded in some instances.
But was it enough? The Washington Post recently reported that IS was creeping back into certain areas, like Anbar Province, because of corruption and weak governance.
The governor of Kirkuk feels the need at this point—after nearly three years of fighting IS, with the terror group finally on the verge of defeat—to press the case for major reforms.
That suggests it was not enough.
The need to conceive and implement the political changes necessary to prevent the emergence of the next iteration of IS was a problem the Obama failed to acknowledge, let alone address. That task has been left to its successor.
Editing by Delovan Barwari