Iraq Shiite Faction Opposes Key Kurdish Demand

The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) is against the incorporation of Kirkuk in an enlarged Kurdish autonomous region, senior party official Ammar al-Hakim told AFP in an interview.

"We do not accept the annexing of Kirkuk to (the autonomous region) because Kirkuk is a micro-Iraq and it belongs to all Iraqis," said Hakim, whose father Abdel Aziz heads the formerly Iran-based Shiite religious faction.

He said his party was also against the eviction of Arab settlers to make way for Kurds returning to homes in Kirkuk which were confiscated under Saddam Hussein's regime.

"We also oppose the forced return of Iraqis to their homes as every Iraqi has the right to live in the city of his choice," he said in the joint interview with AFP and Lebanon's Al-Manar television.

Saddam's regime poured thousands of Arab settlers -- both Sunni and Shiite -- into Kirkuk in the 1970s and 1980s as part of a deliberate attempt to change the city's ethic make-up and undermine Kurdish claims to the key oil centre.

Hakim's party is a leading component of the Shiite-led United Iraqi Alliance which took a majority of seats in parliament in January elections and is now the dominant partner in the government.

But under Iraq's interim constitution, the party was obliged to form a coalition with the second-placed Kurdish alliance for whom restitution of their "historic rights" to Kirkuk is a make-or-break demand.

The city's fate was a key stumbling block in the months of drawn-out negotiations between the two blocs that preceded the formation of the new government in April.

At the time Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a leading Kurdish politician, said the Kirkuk issue had been "addressed satisfactorily" in the coalition agreement "based on procedures and measures mapped out in the transitional (administrative) law".

That interim constitution stipulated that displaced Kurds should have the right to apply for restitution of confiscated homes in Kirkuk and set feasibility as the only criterion for insisting on compensation instead.