Kirkuk: Winners and losers

Losers

Kurds

For the first time, both PUK and KDP felt the heat of iso­la­tion even from the clos­est ally the U.S., because of the actions regional pow­ers sur­round Kur­dis­tan area are now think­ing of form­ing one entity to con­front the grow­ing dan­ger as reported on Al-Watan “

This is the rea­son behind Bashar Al-Assad’s visit to Iran and Turkey….sources expected that Syria – Iran – Turkey sum­mit to crys­tal­lize the final ver­sion of the coordination.

United Iraqi Alliance

Already in a dif­fi­cult posi­tion of find­ing pub­lic sup­port, UIA’s polit­i­cal blocs took dif­fer­ent, con­trary posi­tions at the provin­cial law vot­ing. Badr Orga­ni­za­tion voted in favor of the law is just one of other future splits add to this the UIA put their Turkomen-Shiites mem­bers in a very embar­rass­ing situation.

Win­ners

Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council

Indi­rect and Mar­gin­al­ized small gain. The SIIC opposed hold­ing the provin­cial elec­tions on sched­ule time, for fears of los­ing their influ­ence in any future elec­tions, later they accepted to hold elec­tions on time due to pub­lic opin­ion and the occu­pa­tion pressure.

The SIIC has one last “card” to play to post­pone the elec­tion, which is to block (obstruct) the annual bud­get law since the Finan­cial Min­is­ter is mem­ber of the SIIC.

Kirkuk cri­sis came just in time, and SIIC played a big role in esca­lat­ing the prob­lem by ally­ing with the Kurds to avoid any later embar­rass­ment with block­ing other laws.

Turkomen and Kirkuk-Arabs

For Turkomen, although there is some sup­port from Turkey, the Turkomen allied them­selves with Kirkuk-Arabs because Turkomen don’t have the tribal struc­ture as this of the Arabs and the Kurds [prob­a­bly one day I will write about the reason].

Mix of Shi­ites and Sun­nis, Kirkuk-Arabs wel­comed the sol­i­dar­ity of their extended tribes and fam­i­lies from the south and mid­dle Iraq.

Oth­ers

Sadrists, Accor­dance Front, Iraqi List and Islamic Party, their suc­cess to estab­lish a “spe­cial sit­u­a­tion”, draft­ing and adopt­ing a spe­cial elec­tion law for Kirkuk, as well as the for­ma­tion of a com­mit­tee to look into vio­la­tions that occurred before and after in 2003, the emer­gence of a strong par­lia­men­tary alliance of 110 MP to form “Kirkuk cri­sis cell”. All these achieve­ments are highly jubi­lated by the pub­lic opin­ion and the Iraqi media.