Iraq’s Parliament Approves Budget, Ending Dispute Over Oil Revenue Sharing with Kurdish Region 

Iraqi lawmakers attend a parliamentary session to vote on the federal budget at the parliament headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq, June 11, 2023. (Iraqi Parliament Media Office/Handout via Reuters)
Iraqi lawmakers attend a parliamentary session to vote on the federal budget at the parliament headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq, June 11, 2023. (Iraqi Parliament Media Office/Handout via Reuters)
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Iraq’s Parliament Approves Budget, Ending Dispute Over Oil Revenue Sharing with Kurdish Region 

Iraqi lawmakers attend a parliamentary session to vote on the federal budget at the parliament headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq, June 11, 2023. (Iraqi Parliament Media Office/Handout via Reuters)
Iraqi lawmakers attend a parliamentary session to vote on the federal budget at the parliament headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq, June 11, 2023. (Iraqi Parliament Media Office/Handout via Reuters)

Iraq’s parliament belatedly approved a record $152 billion budget for 2023 on Monday, after months of wrangling over the sharing of oil revenue between the central government in Baghdad and the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region in the north.

The process was also hampered by infighting between different Iraqi Kurdish parties. The budget — approved six months into the fiscal year and after four chaotic late-night voting sessions — allocates 12.6% of the revenue to the Kurdish region and is seen as strengthening Baghdad's hand on the oil revenues.

The central government in Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government in the city of Erbil have been locked in a dispute over oil revenue for years, while competing Kurdish parties are also at loggerheads over their shares.

In the absence of a binding law detailing the sharing of funds from oil and gas exports, the Kurdish region has moved ahead with exports on its own, while Baghdad has maintained that all exports should be run through the state-owned oil marketing company, SOMO, with Erbil receiving a share of the profits.

Under the new budget, the Kurdish region can market its own oil but must deposit the revenue in a bank account that officials from the central government can monitor. Baghdad will then deduct that amount from its monthly allocation to the Kurdish regional government and transfer any surplus money to Erbil.

The budget vote was dragged out over several days, in part due to objections by the largest Kurdish party, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, to the provisions on the revenue sharing process and a related dispute resolution mechanism.

The majority coalition holds the most seats in the 329-seat Iraqi parliament, with 220 seats. The Kurds, who are the second-largest ethnic group in Iraq, have about 60 seats, but they are divided between two main parties: the KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which are often at odds.

The finalization of the budget on Monday was a victory for Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani's government, which was formed last year following a lengthy political vacuum in the wake of the 2021 elections.

Al-Sudani came to power with the support of the Coordination Framework, a coalition of pro-Iranian parties, after the influential Shiite cleric and political leader Moqtada al-Sadr — whose party had won the largest share of seats but not enough to form a government — withdrew from politics.

Paralyzed by the political stalemate, the parliament did not pass a budget last year. With a budget now in place for 2023, al-Sudani’s government is hoping to combat poverty and bring much-needed economic stability.

However, some analysts say the budget is predicated on an overly rosy outlook and warned of a ballooning deficit.

The budget projects 2023 revenue at about $103.3 billion, based on a projected price of $70 per barrel for oil exports, the main source of income for Iraq, with exports estimated at 3.5 million barrels a day, including 400,000 thousand barrels from the Kurdish region. The budget estimates a deficit of about $48 billion.

“The new budget is a cause for concern, as it relies heavily on oil revenue,” said Mudhar Mohammed Salih, al-Sudani’s adviser for financial affairs. “If oil prices drop, the deficit will increase, forcing the government to borrow money. This is a risky proposition, as it could lead to debt problems.”

A report last month by the International Monetary Fund on Iraq's finances warned that the “fiscal loosening” proposed in the budget plan could lead to inflation and exchange rate volatility in the short run, while in the medium term, oil price fluctuations could lead to "critical macroeconomic stability risks.”

“Barring a large increase in oil prices, the current fiscal stance could lead to mounting deficits and intensifying financing pressures in the coming years,” the report said.

Monday’s vote also approved the same budgets of $152 billion for 2024 and 2025 — apparently to avoid haggling over the issue for the next two years.

The parliament session came after an unannounced visit to Iraq by Iranian general Esmail Ghaani, according to two Iraqi Shiite political officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the visit.

Ghaani heads the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, an expeditionary arm of the paramilitary organization answerable only to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He replaced top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, killed in a US airstrike in Baghdad in January 2020.

The two officials said Ghaani left Baghdad on Thursday evening, shortly before the parliament convened in its first late-night session to begin voting on the budget.



Amnesty Accuses Israel of 'Live-streamed Genocide' against Gaza Palestinians

TOPSHOT - Palestinians inspect the damage after an Israeli strike on the Yafa school building, a school-turned-shelter, in Gaza City on April 23, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
TOPSHOT - Palestinians inspect the damage after an Israeli strike on the Yafa school building, a school-turned-shelter, in Gaza City on April 23, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
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Amnesty Accuses Israel of 'Live-streamed Genocide' against Gaza Palestinians

TOPSHOT - Palestinians inspect the damage after an Israeli strike on the Yafa school building, a school-turned-shelter, in Gaza City on April 23, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
TOPSHOT - Palestinians inspect the damage after an Israeli strike on the Yafa school building, a school-turned-shelter, in Gaza City on April 23, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)

Amnesty International on Tuesday accused Israel of committing a "live-streamed genocide" against Palestinians in Gaza by forcibly displacing most of the population and deliberately creating a humanitarian catastrophe.

In its annual report, Amnesty charged that Israel had acted with "specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, thus committing genocide".

Israel has rejected accusations of "genocide" from Amnesty, other rights groups and some states in its war in Gaza.

The conflict erupted after the Palestinian group Hamas's deadly October 7, 2023 attacks inside Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Hamas also abducted 251 people, 58 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel in response launched a relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip and a ground operation that according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory has left at least 52,243 dead.

"Since 7 October 2023, when Hamas perpetrated horrific crimes against Israeli citizens and others and captured more than 250 hostages, the world has been made audience to a live-streamed genocide," Amnesty's secretary general Agnes Callamard said in the introduction to the report.

"States watched on as if powerless, as Israel killed thousands upon thousands of Palestinians, wiping out entire multigenerational families, destroying homes, livelihoods, hospitals and schools," she added.

'Extreme levels of suffering'

Gaza's civil defense agency said early Tuesday that four people were killed and others injured in an Israeli air strike on displaced persons' tents near the Al-Iqleem area in Southern Gaza.

The agency earlier warned fuel shortages meant it had been forced to suspend eight out of 12 emergency vehicles in Southern Gaza, including ambulances.

The lack of fuel "threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens and displaced persons in shelter centers," it said in a statement.

Amnesty's report said the Israeli campaign had left most of the Palestinians of Gaza "displaced, homeless, hungry, at risk of life-threatening diseases and unable to access medical care, power or clean water".

Amnesty said that throughout 2024 it had "documented multiple war crimes by Israel, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks".

It said Israel's actions forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians, around 90 percent of Gaza's population, and "deliberately engineered an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe".

Even as protesters hit the streets in Western capitals, "the world's governments individually and multilaterally failed repeatedly to take meaningful action to end the atrocities and were slow even in calling for a ceasefire".

Meanwhile, Amnesty also sounded alarm over Israeli actions in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank, and repeated an accusation that Israel was employing a system of "apartheid".

"Israel's system of apartheid became increasingly violent in the occupied West Bank, marked by a sharp increase in unlawful killings and state-backed attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians," it said.

Heba Morayef, Amnesty director for the Middle East and North Africa region, denounced "the extreme levels of suffering that Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to endure on a daily basis over the past year" as well as "the world's complete inability or lack of political will to put a stop to it".