SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – Kurdish party chiefs were expected to meet in Sulaimani with US and UN officials today, sources told Rudaw, after talks in Baghdad over a new coalition government snagged over Kurdish oil and territories.

Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and deputy head of the dominant Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), is expected to attend, as are leaders of all the major parties.

The meeting comes amid US and Western pressure for Iraq’s Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds to immediately forge a government in Baghdad, months after elections and as Iraq has turned into the frontline of an international war against Islamic State (IS/ISIS) forces.

The autonomous Kurds want guarantees that their lagging and serious territorial, oil and budget problems with Baghdad will be resolved before agreeing to join the Shiite Prime Minister Heidar al-Abadi’s government.

Talks in Baghdad by the three factions hit a snag on Saturday, with Kurdish negotiators saying it was mainly over issues related to the Kurdistan Region.

The Kurds have indicated they will negotiate with Baghdad as a single front, with all Kurdish parties promising to stand behind a unified decision on key issues.

These include the monthly budget payments to Kurdistan that Baghdad has withheld for more than seven months, after Erbil began independent oil exports that the central government has tried to block and labeled illegal.

The United States also has opposed independent sales by Erbil. But with the Kurdish Peshmerga forces now in the frontlines of a US- and Western-backed war against the Islamic State, the Kurds have a much stronger case to take over their own economy.

Months of withheld arrears from the budget amount to eight trillion Iraqi dinars.

Al-Abadi’s interim government told a Kurdish delegate last week that Baghdad will resume budget payments only if the KRG stops all independent oil exports, and allows the State Oil Marketing Organization to lift 125,000 barrels of oil per day from Kurdish fields.

Legal experts have said that the withholding of the budget – acutely affecting salaried government workers in Kurdistan – is constitutionally illegal.

After a legal complaint against the KRG by the Iraqi government, Iraq’s federal court ruled that Erbil’s oil exports do not violate the constitution. It said that the Kurds were within their legal rights to export oil internationally.

Rudaw