ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Haider al-Abadi, Iraq’s former prime minister, said on Tuesday that the citizens of Kurdistan Region must be granted their rights because they are Iraqis too. “There are constitutional borders between the center [Baghdad] and the Region, and the Region wants what it owns and does not give Baghdad what belongs to it. The citizens of the Kurdistan region are Iraqis and we must give them their rights,” Abadi said during a panel at a forum held by the al-Rafidain Center for Dialogue on Tuesday. Oil exports from the Kurdistan Region through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline halted on March 23, 2023, after a Paris-based arbitration court ruled in favor of Baghdad against Ankara. The court found Ankara in breach of a 1973 agreement for allowing Erbil to initiate independent oil exports in 2014. Abadi, who served as prime minister of Iraq between 2014 and 2018, told Rudaw in an interview earlier this month that he stands by his strict belief that Erbil should export its oil through Baghdad. He also said that his cabinet filed the lawsuit at the Paris court in order to pressure Erbil and Ankara to make an agreement with Baghdad. “Frankly speaking, our goal was to pressure brothers in the Kurdistan Region and Turkey to reach an agreement [with us] because that was a wrong path. We are talking about Iraqi oil, which belongs to all Iraqis. But they traded with it as per an agreement whose details were not known to us,” the former prime minister said. “When I was prime minister, I paid all the salaries of the Region, including the Peshmerga,” he claimed during the Tuesday panel. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday received Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein in Washington. US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Tuesday that they touched on Erbil-Baghdad issues. “So they did discuss that [Erbil-Baghdad] issue. The secretary made clear that stability between Baghdad and Erbil would bring economic benefits to all Iraqis. It would be good for the region, and that we encourage the two partners to work together,” Miller told Rudaw during a press briefing.
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