“Engineer Tayb Jabar is the strongest candidate who has the chance to assume the post of governor and the KDP has already agreed on him,” a PUK official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Rudaw.
Tayb, 65, was born in the village of Tapalu in Qarahassan village. An engineer by trade, he is a former deputy minister for Housing and Construction in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). He is also a published poet.
Rawand Mala Mahmood, the deputy head of the PUK office in Kirkuk, told Rudaw on Wednesday the parties will formally announce their candidate by Sunday.
PUK media, citing official PUK sources, also reported Tayb will be the joint candidate of the KDP, PUK, and the Brotherhood List of the Kirkuk Provincial Council.
After months of wrangling, the KDP and PUK announced on Monday they had agreed to back a single candidate to become the next governor of Kirkuk. However, neither side revealed the candidate’s name at the time.
Cabinet talks had been dragging on for months since the Kurdistan Region’s parliamentary election on September 30, primarily because of disagreements between the ruling KDP and the PUK over the problem of Kirkuk. The PUK wanted to resolve the problem of Kirkuk before joining the new KRG cabinet.
Oil-rich Kirkuk has many ethno-religious components. In last year’s Iraqi parliamentary election, Kurds won six seats, Arabs three, and Turkmen three, while Christians took their single minority quota seat.
Under Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution, Kirkuk has a special disputed status, claimed by both the Kurdistan Region and the federal government in Baghdad. It has been under the control of the latter since the events of October 2017, when federal troops and Hashd al-Shaabi paramilitias seized it from the Kurdish Peshmerga.
The province had a Kurdish governor, Najmaldin Karim, who was sacked by the Iraqi government and replaced by his Arab deputy, acting governor Rakan Saeed al-Jabouri.
With reporting from Aso Sarawy and Zhelwan Z. Wali
