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August 15th, 2017 
Awake Goy 
nsnbc : The High Electoral and Referendum Commission of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq will officially set the dates for presidential and parliamentary elections on November 1, following the referendum on the independence of the region from Iraq on September 25.
Sayah Kurachi, a member of the High Electoral and Referendum Commission, on Monday, told NRT the commission has appointed September 25 as the date for the referendum on the independence of Kurdistan and November 1 as the date to hold the presidential and parliamentary elections in the Kurdistan Region.
Hemin Hawrami, a senior assistant to Kurdistan Autonomous Region President Massoud Barzani, tweeted on Monday that the “Kurdistan election commission ratified and approved the dates for referendum, parliament and presidential elections”.
The scheduling of the elections came after Barzani issued a decree ordering the Commission to set the dates and go ahead with preparing the elections and referendum.
The Gorran (Change Movement), the KAR’s second largest party after Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party, as well as the Kurdistan Islamic Group (KIG), said on July 11 that presidential elections and the referendum should be held together or the referendum should be postponed.
Gorran also demands that parliament should be normalized before a referendum, and Gorran and the KDP disagree whether an independent Kurdistan should have a parliamentary or executive presidential system.
Massoud Barzani has led the KAR as president from 2005 for two executive terms and his last term was extended in 2013 by ruling KDP and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) for two more years on the condition that he can no longer run as president.
Barzani’s term as Kurdistan President ended on August 20, 2015 but he refused to step down and remains unofficially in office. According to the law, Barzani cannot run for the presidency anymore and his term cannot be extended, but his clan-based KDP party insists that Barzani should remain president of the region. He could, arguably, run for another term under a new constitution.
Barzani has closed the Kurdish parliament in October 2015 after his term expired and his KDP forces prevented Kurdistan parliament speaker, Yusuf Mohammed Sadiq, from Gorran Movement, from entering Erbil.
The Kurdistan Region’s political parties, not including the second biggest party of Change (Gorran) Movement and the Kurdistan Islamic Group (KIG), came to an agreement on June 7 to hold a referendum on the region’s independence on September 25, 2017.
CH/L – nsnbc 14.08.2017
Source Article from https://nsnbc.me/2017/08/14/commission-approves-dates-for-iraqi-kurdistan-independence-referendum-and-elections/
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