PM Abadi's warning: Separation will harm Kurds
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has warned against Iraq's disintegration, saying a potential separation of the country’s Kurds would harm them.
"That is totally objectionable. We are serious about Iraq’s territorial integrity,” Abadi said in an interview with the Iraqi Kurdistan region's Rudaw media outlet published on Saturday.
"I have asked the Kurdish leaders not to out us or themselves in an embarrassing situation,” the Iraqi prime minister said.
"I don’t like prolonging the issue of referendum because the result is already obvious. But the question is whether they will act on the results or not?” he said, suggesting that such a plebiscite would assuredly lead to the region’s secession.
Read more:
On Thursday, Hemin Hawrami, a senior assistant to Masoud Barzani, told Rudaw the Iraqi Kurdistan's president had told UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres that the vote would get underway "at the earliest time."
The agency said representatives of the two main Kurdish parties of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) would meet on Sunday to discuss the issue of a referendum.
“Separation now and in the past has done the Kurds harm because your neighbors do not accept that either," Abadi said.
Ibrahim Kalin, the spokesperson for Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reacted to the communication between Barzani and Guterres on Friday, saying that holding an independence vote would be a “wrong step.”
Turkey has been engaged in a decades-long conflict with Kurdish militants seeking to carve out an independent state in the country’s southeast. The conflict has killed many thousands of people.
The Turkish military conducts airstrikes against the militants’ positions in northern Iraq.
Iraqi resistance forces strike vital Israeli positions with drones
Iraqi resistance launches drone strikes on vital Israeli targets in Haifa, Golan
Saudi MBC Group fires news director after insult to resistance leaders
US surgeon haunted by Gaza children with ‘single gunshot wounds to head’
VIDEO | Fatal Harvest: Escalating attacks on Palestinian farmers in the occupied West Bank
Hamas rejects temporary truce offer, calls for complete ceasefire in Gaza
Iran among top nuclear technology countries: AEOI chief
Democrats 'risk losing' election for backing Israeli war on Gaza, Lebanon: US journalist
Protesters remove busts of Israel's first president from Manchester Univ.
VIDEO | Hezbollah drones
US involvement in Israel’s 'regional war' unconstitutional, lawmakers tell Biden
PressTV NEWSLETTER
now
This makes it easy to access the Press TV website
