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Press TV has conducted an interview with Zayd al-Isa, Iraq affairs expert from London, about Baghdad taking legal action against Turkey for exporting oil from Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.  

Press TV: Obviously the legal implications here are on one side but the political message that is being sent from Turkey and the Kurdistan region, tell us more about that.

Al-Isa: This has been going on for some time. We’ve seen that the autonomous region and I do call it an autonomous region in Kurdistan, the Kurdish regional government which is led exclusively by Masoud Barzani who has extended his presidency in defiance of all democratic procedures. He has given himself an extra two years and has ramped up and strengthened his hold in the region after his rival Jalal Talabani has fallen ill and has basically lost power.

So Masoud Barzani has gained the upper hand. He has been absolutely defiant and he has been steadfastly determined to thwart and foil any attempts to actually bring the oil export of Kurdistan which is still now a federal part of Iraq under scrutiny by the central government.

That is a flagrant violation and gross violation of the constitution of Iraq which stipulates clearly that oil and gas belongs to the Iraqi people and their entirety. And direct control has to be established by exclusively the central government of Iraq which then distributes the revenues according to the population of Iraq.

We’ve seen that the Iraqi Kurdish government has been taking seventeen percent of the Iraqi national budget and has been using that to ramp up the viability of its independence and also to ratchet up the credibility of its independence. It has been acting ever since 2003 as an independent entity with its foreign policy. It has grown closer to Turkey despite the direct and overt hostility by the Turkish government against the Iraqi central government.

Turkish government has been in alliance with Saudi Arabia and Qatar has been encouraging and spearing on the Kurdish regional government to act in defiance of the central government in order to destabilize and ultimately weaken the central government in Iraq and also ramp up the viability of easing any dependence that the Kurdish regional government had on Iraqi central government in order to create its own infrastructure and its own pipeline in an illegal and illegitimate move which is a direct and flagrant violation of the constitution where all the revenue should be brought to the Iraqi central government.

We’ve seen the Kurdish regional government acting independently in terms of foreign policy and establishing close relations with countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey in defiance of the central government. We’ve seen them establishing their own military infrastructure in terms of the Peshmerga and also demanding that the central government should actually finance the Peshmerga who has been acting independently and also confronting the Iraqi military army.

We’ve seen them having their own independent judiciary which has not been coordinating or cooperating with the Iraqi judiciary, offering sanctuary to all those who have been wanted by the Iraqi central government like Tariq al-Hashemi and other fugitives who have broken the Iraqi law.