“The Kurdistan region will not develop without Iraq, and Iraq must be united in all its components”

The Iraqi prime minister has stressed the need for preserving the country’s territorial integrity and called on Kurdistan to scrap any plans for independence, saying the autonomous northern region could not do without the mainland.

“The Kurdistan region will not develop without Iraq, and Iraq must be united in all its components,” Haider al-Abadi said following talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on Thursday.

“Kurdistan is part of Iraq and I hope it will remain so,” he added.

The remarks came more than one week after President of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Masoud Barzani stated that the time is ripe for the region to hold a referendum on statehood despite major economic problems with which it is struggling.