ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraq’s electoral body on Thursday said it has begun issuing the “official signature forms” required to initiate the autonomy bid by Basra, which sits atop up to 60 percent of Iraq’s oil reserves. The move is seen as a step closer to recognizing the province’s push for autonomy that has often been overlooked by successive governments since 2008.
Haidar Mohammed, director of Basra’s Elections Office, affiliated with the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), stated that “provincial councils, through a request signed by one-third of their members,” and “voters, through a request signed by one-tenth of them,” have “the right to submit an official and direct request” to “activate the popular will” option.
Speaking to the state-run Iraqi News Agency (INA), Mohammed added that Iraqi law outlines that option in Article 4 of Law No. 13 of 2008 - the Law for Executive Procedures for the Formation of Regions.
“The law requires that a petition be signed by 2 percent of a province’s voters and submitted to the IHEC office, including details of the proposed region,” Mohammed explained. The Commission must then announce the request within three days through the media and keep the petition register open for at least a month, allowing eligible voters to “sign and reach the legally required 10 percent threshold to proceed to a referendum.”
Once the petitions are validated, the IHEC submits a request to the Council of Ministers to set a date for the referendum on Basra’s autonomy bid, the Elections’ Office director explained.
Although the IHEC’s actions are administrative and executive in nature, their significance lies in breaking the long-standing stalemate that has plagued the oil-rich province’s decade-old pursuit of autonomy.
While Basra reportedly contributes around 80 percent of the country’s oil exports, it continues to suffer from poor public services, fueling long-standing frustration with Baghdad.
The first push for autonomy in the oil-rich province came in 2008, led by former Iraqi judge and lawmaker Wael Abdul Latif, who described Basra as “the golden goose that feeds the rest of Iraq while its own children starve.”
“We are not asking for secession; we are asking for the federalism guaranteed by law to manage our own resources,” Latif stated at the time.
The movement gained renewed momentum in 2018, when a severe water crisis left 100,000 residents hospitalized due to contaminated supplies.
In recent years, Basra Governor Asaad al-Eidani has emerged as the pivotal figure in the province’s high-stakes standoff with Baghdad, alternating between calls for constitutional autonomy and warnings against national fragmentation.
Eidani in 2018 stated that “a delegation from Basra will soon visit the Kurdistan Region to study their model of decentralization,” aiming to “benefit from the Region’s experience and transfer it to Basra.”
In a late-2025 press conference, he accused the federal finance ministry of strangling the oil-rich province, asserting, “Basra has not received even a penny of its share from this year’s federal budget,” and noting that only 37 percent of the province’s 2024 allocations had been disbursed.
Of note, in Iraq’s mid-November legislative elections, Eidani - leading the Tasmim Alliance - won 12 of Basra’s 23 seats in the 329-member parliament. He is also considered a leading contender for the premiership.
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