Kurdish party supports Biden's calls for a federalised Iraq

The Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by Massoud Barzani, said Monday, that the division of Iraq into three separate federal regions is the optimal solution for resolving Iraq’s political challenges.

Kurdistan Democratic Party spokesperson, Kamal Kirkuki in a statement Monday said, "The ideal solution for Iraq’s political problems is to divide Iraq into three independent regions Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite." The country, he said, "must be managed as an Iraqi confederation,” reported the Iraqi Alsharaqia News.

The party statement follows comments late last week from US Vice President Joe Biden who said the United States would back a federal system in Iraq. His comments were made as the US presses for political unity in the sharply divided country amid advances by Islamic State (IS) militants whose campaign to seize Iraqi territory has gained momentum since June.

In a Washington Post opinion piece on Friday, Biden wrote that the United States is ready to "further enhance" its support of Iraq's fight against the Islamic State and pointed to "functioning federalism" as a potential approach to breach Iraqi political divisions.

Biden warned that the deep sectarian divisions and political mistrust had "sapped the strength" of Iraqi security forces and strengthened militants like IS.

Despite a US campaign of air raids backing regional Kurdish and Iraqi forces fighting IS in the north of the country, Biden said the threat "can be routed by local forces without US boots on the ground."

Biden is a longtime supporter of a plan under which Iraq would be divided into three semi-autonomous regions for Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. In 2006, as a member of the US Senate, he proposed that Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region join two others, one Sunni and one Shi’ite, in a major decentralisation of power away from Baghdad. Biden’s proposal was rejected at the time by all of Iraq’s factions - with the exception of the Kurds.

A plan along these lines would "ensure equitable revenue-sharing for all provinces and establish locally rooted security structures, such as a national guard, to protect the population in cities and towns and deny space for ISIL while protecting Iraq's territorial integrity," Biden said in his Washington Post piece, using another acronym by which IS is known.

"The United States would be prepared to offer training and other forms of assistance under our Strategic Framework Agreement to help such a model succeed," he added.

While the Kurdish party voiced its support for a three regional-state solution, the majority of Sunni Arab leaders in Erbil rejected Biden’s federal state initiative as a means of dividing and fragmenting Iraq while others welcomed it as the only solution to end the violence and division, reported Al-Sharq al-Awsat News Agency.

The Sunni factions which rejected the initiative proposed by Biden included representatives of Iraq’s Revolutionary Tribes Council and the National Salvation Front. A member of the Iraqi Islamic Army’s political bureau, Ahmad Dabbash, told reporters, “This is the only way for Iraq to establish justice and end the violence."

Meanwhile, thousands of Kurds gathered in front of the UN headquarters in Erbil, demanding independence from Iraq,” Al-Sharq Al-Awsat also reported.