KDP official says Kurdistan Region will talk to Baghdad for a peaceful separation

As part of his visit to the US, Hemin Hawrami met a group of policy experts at the Middle East Institute in Washington to discuss the political developments and military campaigns in the Kurdistan Region. Prior to this meeting, Mr Hawrami presented a seminar at the two-day Socialist International committee conference in New York.

Mr Hawrami outlined to a panel in Washington on Wednesday that the process of Kurdistan’s independence is ongoing and that Erbil is seeking an “amicable divorce” from Baghdad, which he argued would contribute to the stability in the region.

The head of Kurdistan Democratic Party's Foreign Relations Office mentioned in his speech to delegates that before Mosul fell to terrorists organisation 'Islamic State', the Kurdish government alerted their Iraqi counterparts in Baghdad in December 2013 that there was an imminent threat from ISIL against the country, adding that the Kurdistan Region "had done its best" to ensure a federal, realistic and constitutional government was stable in Iraq based on power-sharing.

Mr Hawrami emphasised the Peshmerga victories where they have forced ISIL to retreat from key areas and scoring a number of victories in defeating them before rejecting any notion that Kurds were exploiting the war against ISIS to make territorial expansion, saying, “We have not carried out territorial expansion. It was Maliki’s army, as a friend of mine described, that peacefully handed over territories to ISIS. Maliki’s army surrendered to ISIS and they withdraw from all those territories, if we were not there, ISIS would have taken Kirkuk and other areas.