MPs leave former president Talabani’s funeral protesting Kurdish flag
The body former Iraqi president Jalal Talabani arrives in Kurdistan.
Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) A number of Iraqi MPs have walked out of the funeral of former president Jalal Talabani finding out that his casket was draped in a Kurdish flag.
The body of Talabani, who died in a Germany hospital on Tuesday, arrived Friday morning to the Kurdistan city of Suleimaniya, where a massive Kurdish, Iraqi and foreign attendance waited for the ceremony.
Alsumaria News reported that a number of members of the Arab-dominated parliament in Baghdad left the funeral in protest at the flag. Speaking to the network, Jassem Mohamed Jaafar, a member of the State of the Law parliamentary bloc, deemed the scene an action of “treason”, accusing Talabani’s wife of perpetrating it.
Jaafar said it was Mrs. Talabani who asked for her husband’s body to be received at Suleimaniya directly, rather than Baghdad.
Wrapping the casket with a Kurdish flag was “a belittlement of Talabani who was a symbol of Iraq’s unity” and caused “an embarrassment to Iraqi officials who attended the funeral,” said Jaafar.
A former secretary-General of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of Kurdistan’s largest political group, Talabani was elected in 2005, following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as Iraq’s first non-Arab president. He stepped down in 2014.
His death came amid high tensions between Baghdad and Erbil after the autonomous region held a referendum on independence from Iraq which was voted positively by 92% of voters.