Safeen Dizayee

The time has come for the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Baghdad to start discussing an "amicable divorce," according to a spokesperson for the Kurdish autonomous region.

"We should enter a serious dialogue with Baghdad to reach an amicable solution - an amicable solution for divorce," KRG spokesperson Safeen Dizayee recently told daily Hürriyet.

The Kurdistan Regional Government has challenged Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to deliver on an offer to pay the cash-strapped region's bloated public payroll, suggesting the proposal had not been made in good faith. Abadi said in a televised interview earlier this week that he was prepared to cover the KRG payroll as long as it stopped exporting oil independently. 

The prime minister of Iraq's Kurdistan region has appointed ministers to replace four who were unilaterally expelled from the cabinet by his party during the worst political crisis in years. 

The Iraqi government and the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in the north of the country have reached a deal to ease tensions over Kurdish oil exports and civil service payments from Baghdad, Iraq’s finance minister told Reuters on Nov. 13.