Kurds' Kirkuk demands raised after rebuff

BAGHDAD, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- A top Iraqi Kurdish leader says oil-rich Kirkuk's fate will be decided in a vote, a day after a coalition of Sunni and Shiite Arabs united against Kurd plans.

"There is no turning back," Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, told the Los Angeles Times. "The referendum must be conducted in the next six months."

The Shiite and Sunni parties -- which include former allies of the current governing coalition and whose members number 150 of Iraq's 275 parliamentarians -- say the KRG's plans for Kirkuk and their controversial oil deals are bad for the country.

The al-Mutamar newspaper reports the statement of the new coalition backs the national government's right to decide how Iraq's oil sector is developed.

The KRG, claiming the national government is too slow on setting oil policy and unconstitutionally keeping central control, has passed a regional oil law and signed dozens of exploration and production deals with international oil firms.

Baghdad has called them illegal, threatened to blacklist the companies and says it's the KRG that is acting unconstitutionally.

The statement says the deals and the Kirkuk desires by the Kurds are dividing the country.

Kirkuk is a northern Iraq city and its adjacent oil fields are some of the oldest and largest in Iraq. Saddam Hussein kicked out Kurds, Turkomen and others who were living there and replaced them with Arabs.

He also redrew the lines of the provinces, taking Kirkuk and other northern areas out of the three heavily Kurdish provinces that make up the KRG now.

Iraqi Kurds ensured the 2005 Constitution reverses Saddam's move, ending with a referendum by Dec. 31, 2007, to allow voters to decide the future. The KRG wants voters to be able to choose to join its area.

But Iraqi Arabs, backed by nationalists in Baghdad and other parts of the country, and Turkomen, who have the backing of Turkey, are virulently opposed to the plan.

A U.N.-brokered deal late last year gave the issue six months of breathing room. Turkey and others want the fate of Kirkuk to be negotiated, not solved in a vote. The KRG says that's out of the question, saying the constitution mandates it.

But opponents, who back a centralized government and don't want Kirkuk and its oil part of the semiautonomous Kurdish region, say that missing the constitution's deadline makes the article null and void.

The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a large Shiite Arab bloc and partner with the Kurds in the governing coalition, favors forming a KRG-style region in the south, where most of Iraq's proven oil reserves are located.

Al Sharqiyah TV in Dubai reports Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, co-leader of Iraq's Kurds with Barzani, is meeting with the Fadhila Party to shore up support for the fledgling governing coalition.