ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) has agreed to hold a party congress sometime in 2020 in a decision that came during a Leadership Council meeting on Saturday that was chaired by the group's leader, Masoud Barzani.
During the gathering, top KDP officials discussed a total of four different topics, the last of which was a consensus on holding a congress. The move, the KDP said in a statement, is meant to update party positions and "vitalize" its various bodies in light of "the current situation of the Kurdistan Region and Iraq, and the rapid changes internally and regionally."
The date of the congress, the party's fourteenth, has not yet been publicly announced. The council has designated its Political Bureau, one of the KDP's primary councils, to make preparations necessary to support a major party convention.
Another issue the council meeting addressed, according to a KDP statement, was the recent notable sessions of the Iraqi parliament that called on the federal government to demand the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraqi territory, namely American forces.
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No Kurdish and few Sunni lawmakers attended the session, appearing to walk across the political tightrope between voting with Tehran-backed Iraqi parties for the US troops' ouster and angering the anti-American factions by voting against them. Kurds see the US-led international coalition as vital to the fight against the so-called Islamic State.
The KDP said that the lawmakers’ decision was “far from the leading principles upon which the Iraqi state was built following the collapse of the regime in 2003,” noting that those principles were “partnership and balance in governance” between different ethnic and religious components of the country.
The council meeting also addressed the growing instability in Iraq, concluding that it was a key factor in a number of tit-for-tat attacks between the US and Iran, raising fears of an all-out war between the two arch-foes.
The KDP said that it agrees that “all efforts must be made to prevent Iraq from becoming entangled in those regional and international issues,” in the statement, which went on to stress that all decisions made by the Iraqi government must serve the interests of all Iraq citizens.
The party leadership also reiterated its support for the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) recent endeavors to bring about reform in governance, noting the recent passage of the Reform Bill by the regional parliament.
Editing by John J. Catherine