Talabani, Barazani meet in Arbil

ARBIL / IraqiNews.com: Iraqi President Jalal Talabani arrived in Arbil, the capital of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan Region, on Monday and held a meeting with the region’s president, Massoud Barazani, an informed source said. “The two leaders are now holding a meeting in the resort of Salah al-Din, (25 km) east of Arbil,” the source told IraqiNews.com. The source expected the meeting, attended by members of Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Barazani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) politburos, to “take up recent developments in Iraq and the Kurdistan region as well as efforts to deal with problems marring relations between the Kurdistan Regional Government Kurdistan RegionG) and the federal government”. Earlier on Monday, the region presidency’s media spokesman, Faysal al-Dabbagh, said that Talabani will leave for the city of Arbil to meet Barazani. The two sides will discuss the political situation in Iraq in general and the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region in particular, he added. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Muhammad, a member of the KDP politburo, said that the meetings between the two sides will continue until afternoon today. Muhammad did not give further details. The PUK and KDP are the main two components of the Kurdistan Alliance (KA), the second largest bloc in the Iraqi parliament with 53 out of a total 275 seats. Arbil, also written Erbil or Irbil, is believed to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited in the world and is one of the largest cities in Iraq. The city lies eighty kilometers (fifty miles) east of Mosul. In 2005, its estimated population was 990,000 inhabitants. The city is the capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan region and the Kurdistan RegionG. It hosts the headquarters of the Kurdistan region ministers and parliament. Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, only isolated, sporadic violence has hit Arbil, unlike many other areas of Iraq. AmR (S) 1