Iraq’s parliament speaker and a prominent Shiite bloc are standing against Halabja’s ascension to a province, a Kurdish MP in the Iraqi parliament said on Tuesday as the deputy speakers refused to hold the legislature’s session.
“Both deputy speakers refused to hold today’s parliamentary session since Mr. [Mohammed al-] Halbousi did not agree to include Halabja [ascension to a province] on the agenda,” Muthanna Amin, an Iraqi MP, told Rudaw’s Sangar Abdulrahman.
The Iraqi cabinet in March approved a bill to make Halabja a province, in recognition of the 35th anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s brutal chemical attack against the city. For the decision to be finalized, the Iraqi legislature needs to pass the bill through a vote.
According to Amin, a meeting of parliamentary blocs is set to be held on Tuesday. Both Halbousi’s bloc and the State of Law, who are scheduled to attend the meeting, have “displayed a negative stance” towards Halabja’s ascension.
“We want them to honestly tell us what their issue is with this topic. Is it a national issue, or an issue of legal or financial commitment?” he said.
The Kurdish MP of the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), who is from Halabja, called on the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) President Masoud Barzani and the KDP leadership, who are allied with Halbousi, to question him about his stance on the matter.
“Ask him why he is showing such a stance against the genocide of a nation,” he said, referring to a brutal genocide in the city committed by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
On the last days of the eight-year-long war between Iran and Iraq, warplanes of the former regime of Saddam Hussein rained down a lethal cocktail of chemical weapons on the city of Halabja on March 16, 1988, killing at least 5,000 people, mostly women and children, and injuring hundreds of others. The attack was part of a longer genocidal campaign against Iraq’s Kurds by the Baathist regime.
The event, which was recognized as an act of genocide by Iraq's High Court in 2010, has left a permanent scar in the memory of the Kurdish people.
Rudaw understands that Shiite blocs in the Iraqi parliament want to ascend the town of Tal Afar to a separate province from Nineveh, while Sunni blocs have issued similar demands for Fallujah in Anbar province.
“There are other areas, especially Tal Afar in Nineveh province, that could be separated and become an independent province, and we are calling for a vote on it for various reasons,” Moein al-Kadhimi, MP of the Fatah alliance in the Iraqi parliament, told Rudaw’s Ziad Ismail.
The Kurdistan Region’s Council of Ministers in 2014 issued a decision to turn Halabja into a province, making it the fourth province in the Region. Four years later, the Iraqi interior ministry recognized it as a province.
“This is a decisive subject for anyone who wants to be a friend of the Kurds or those who want to be against the Kurds,” Amin said, blaming Halbousi for caving into pressure from Sunni and Shiite blocs to turn other areas in Iraq into provinces as a prerequisite of approving to Halabja’s ascension.
Halabja used to be a city within Sulaimani province. Some residents have complained that not much has changed since its status has been changed to province.
The province has a population of 120,000 and it consists of four subdistricts: Khurmal, Biyara, Bamo, and Sirwan. It is a tourist destination.
Earlier this year, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani told Rudaw in a press conference that his cabinet is “serious” about recognizing the Kurdish city of Halabja as a province.
During the tenure of former premier Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi cabinet approved a bill to make Halabja the country’s 19th province in December 2013. Nonetheless, the deterioration of Erbil-Baghdad relations soon after and disagreements between the Sunni and Shiite blocs of the parliament prevented the legislature from officially passing the bill.