Kirkuk conflict Baghdad has been discriminating against the province of Kirkuk in northern Iraq and has not been paying its dues for oil revenues since 2014, so there is no logic for the disputed province to stay with Iraq, the governor of Kirkuk, Najmadin Karim, has said in an interview with the Voice of America’s Kurdish service. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has paid its share of the so-called ‘petrodollars’ payment system to Kirkuk, whereas the Iraqi government has been withholding all payments to Kirkuk despite earlier agreements, the governor said. The city of Kirkuk has not been included in the decision-making process regarding its own oil over the past decades, Karim noted. According to Kurdish media network Rudaw, Iraq’s Prime Minister Haidar Al-Abadi has recently said that Iraq will not oppose a Kurdish independence referendum since “every nation is entitled to it as it is a right recognized […]