The not very surprising results in Kirkuk

How Turkey helped Allawi in Kirkuk?

Not very sur­pris­ing results for Al-Iraqiya in Kirkuk, espe­cially for those who watched Aljazeera’s Iraqi elec­tion reports from Turkey. Aljazeera core­spon­dent in Ankara “Omar Lafi” said this in three dif­fer­ent reports:

While Iraqis abroad required to con­firm their Iraqi iden­tity with two Iraqi IDs, IHEC in Turkey allowed the 25,000 Iraqi Turk­men to vote show­ing one ID or any paper con­firms their iden­tity. This is part of a secret unwrit­ten agree­ment between the Iraqi politi­cians and the Turk­ish Gov.

These mea­sures above are taken (if any­body won­ders why Allawi vis­ited Turkey — days before the elec­tion) to counter the Kur­dish attempts to send as much peo­ple as pos­si­ble to Kirkuk to vote claim­ing they are dis­placed by the for­mer regime, as reported on Turk­ish news­pa­per Today’s Zaman:

In Kirkuk, Kurds are the obvi­ous win­ners. The Kur­dish local gov­ern­ment had car­ried vot­ers in buses to Kirkuk, where new neigh­bor­hoods were cre­ated for the arriv­ing Kur­dish villagers.

Turkey and “Goran” Party!

On the Kurds issue, Turkey is not likely to be happy increas­ing pop­u­lar­ity of Nushir­wan Mustafa, since Ankara is aware that the level of Kur­dish nation­al­ism in Goran Party is much more than these in the Kur­dis­tan Alliance, who are ready to bar­gain on this issue.

Why help­ing Allawi and not Maliki?

Turkey observed Maliki’s behav­ior with neigh­bor­ing coun­tries (Saudi Ara­bia, Syria and Jor­dan) and Maliki’s refusal to all Turkey’s attempts to medi­ate between Iraq and Syria. Turkey came with one con­clu­sion: Maliki’s Gov. is untrust­wor­thy. If Maliki given a sec­ond term, he may affect the Turk­ish oil Nabucco pipeline projects, the fact that the par­tic­i­pa­tion of Mesopotamia in the Nabucco pipeline, which is Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plan who included Iraq about a year ago, to keep Turkey as the most impor­tant cor­ri­dor in the world oil.