“Our door is open to teachers,” Abbas al-Sudani, head of the Iraqi Teachers’ Union, told Rudaw’s Arez Khalid. “Whenever they come to us, we will welcome them with the utmost generosity and convey their demands to the Iraqi prime minister and we will work seriously to solve their problems.”
Teachers from Sulaimani and Halabja provinces have been on strike for more than two months over unpaid wages by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). On Sunday, a group of striking teachers planned to protest in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and ask the federal government to take over paying their wages. They said they were, however, prevented from passing through a checkpoint in Kirkuk.
“About 1,000 teachers from Sulaimani, Halabja, Garmiyan, and Raparin headed to Baghdad this morning, but security forces in Kirkuk are preventing some from crossing,” striking teacher Adel Hassan told Rudaw.
A second group was also barred from making the trip. “About 350 teachers from Kalar, Darbandikhan, Kifri, and Khanaqin headed towards Baghdad this morning to organize their sit-ins in Tahrir Square in Baghdad,” said Nabard Ahmed, a teacher representative from Kalar.
They left at 6 o’clock in the morning but were stopped by Iraqi security forces at Kulajo checkpoint who told the teachers they had received instructions to not allow them passage.
“One of our main demands is for Baghdad to distribute salaries directly through our government banks, and to keep the salaries of teachers and public employees away from the political conflict between the Kurdistan Region and Baghdad,” said Ahmed.
Frequent delays in paying salaries has been an issue for the cash-strapped KRG for nearly a decade, especially since oil exports were halted in March, drying up government coffers.
Teachers and other public employees went unpaid for around 90 days before a deal was struck between Baghdad and Erbil in mid-September, in which the federal government agreed to loan the KRG 2.1 trillion Iraqi dinars to cover three months of payroll. Teachers are yet to receive their salaries for the months of September and October.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani’s office on Wednesday said that Baghdad has no objection to distributing the Kurdistan Region’s salaries directly, but would require Erbil to share its official employee data.
A similar earlier offer was rejected by Erbil as an attempt to belittle the political entity of the Kurdistan Region and its government, Jamal Kochar, a member of the parliament’s finance committee, told Rudaw in July.
