An Iraqi government spokesman announced the country may adopt a new flag after KRG president Massoud Barzani ordered the current flag of Iraq removed from all official sites in Iraqi Kurdistan, reported Reuters.

Turkish government officials reacted harshly to Barzani’s decree, calling it “dangerous.” Ankara also stridently opposes a referendum slated for 2007 that could result in Kirkuk, along with its oil, being incorporated into the Kurdish autonomous region.

Some 25 million Kurds live in a territory spanning the intersection of the borders of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Armenia, and Syria. More than half, or up to 15 million, live in southeastern Turkey. Baghdad, Ankara, Tehran, and Damascus fear that any move toward independence, or even formal autonomy, by Iraqi Kurds could be a mortal threat to their states, as it would inspire national struggles for self-determination among their Kurdish populations.

Iraq’s deputy prime minister, Barham Salih, announced that a basic agreement on sharing oil revenues had been reached but that differences remained over how responsibility for oil and gas reserves are to be divided between the central and regional governments, according to an August 27 Reuters dispatch.

Salih noted that the constitution gives the central government primary control over currently producing oil fields but it is unclear regarding new fields.

Under the agreement, oil revenues would be divided up at the federal level and redistributed to the regions. But it would also limit the central government’s control and micromanagement of the industry, Salih said.

Following a meeting with an Iraqi Turkmen delegation in Ankara, Turkish foreign minister Abdullah Gul called a referendum on the status of Kirkuk “unproductive.”

Nearly 100,000 Kurds have resettled in Kirkuk since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Thousands of Kurds were forcibly removed from Kirkuk by his Baath Party regime in the early 1980s. Their lands and homes were taken by Arabs, also forced to move to Kirkuk, in an “Arabization” campaign to ensure Baathist control of the region’s huge oil reserves. Kirkuk accounts for 40 percent of Iraq’s proven oil reserves

Iraq resumed pumping oil through a pipeline to an export facility in Turkey on August 29, reported Reuters. Iraq pumped 8.5 million barrels of crude through the line before it was sabotaged on July 9. Iraqi oil officials had hoped to pump 300,000 barrels per day, which highlights the importance of Kirkuk’s oil to the country’s export earnings.

Gul also demanded that the Iraqi government take action against the decree by the KRG replacing the Iraqi flag. “If Iraq is willing to accept a flag that is not its own to fly over its own territory, it’s over,” Gul said, according to AP.

In response, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki issued a statement saying, “The Iraqi flag is the only flag that should be raised over any square inch of Iraq.”

But Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, a Kurd and leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, defended the removal of the flag, calling it “the Saddamist flag.”

The current flag is a Baathist design adopted after the first Baath Party government was installed in a military coup in 1963. Hussein in 1990 added the words Allahu Akbar (Allah is the Greatest) to the flag in his own handwriting. That wording has been maintained but with a neutral typography.
 
 
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