Kurds hold key in Iraqi parliament

The Shiites and the Kurds, both brutally persecuted under Saddam, will take the vast majority of the new government posts, leaving the Sunnis, who have controlled Iraq for 1,200 years, pushed to the sidelines.

But it is the Kurds who have emerged with the best deal, despite the fact that they form only 20% of the population.

As a result of the huge turnout in Kurdish areas in the January election, they have 77 seats to the Shiites’ 140 in the 275-seat assembly, so that without Kurdish support the Shiites are short of the two-thirds majority they need to place their candidates in the new government posts.

The parliament will elect a Shiite, Ibrahim al Jaafari, a 57-year-old London doctor, as prime minister, with Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani becoming president in a largely ceremonial position.

But more important for the Kurds, they will get their own share of Iraq’s oil wealth, and there will be negotiations on redrawing the boundaries of the Kurdish region in the north to include the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. More than 100,000 Kurds who were ethnically cleansed from Kirkuk in Saddam’s attempts to turn it into an Arab city will have the right to return.

For well over a decade the Kurds have enjoyed their own semi-autonomous state as a result of joint US-British round-the-clock air cover which created a no-fly zone that was out of bounds to Saddam’s air force. To these rights may now also be added the right to retain their own militia, the peshmergas, giving the Kurds many of the elements of a semi-independent state.

"The Kurds are the big winners and since the election have been in the best position to make a deal," said Turi Munthe, head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the London-based the Royal United Services Institute. "The Shiites were convinced that they were going to get a two-thirds majority. Now it looks like they are being forced to sell off bits of Iraq to the Kurds."