ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Kurds in Kirkuk say they are upset that despite an increase in the number of votes for Kurdish parties in Iraq's parliamentary elections, they actually lost seats in the disputed province.
Of 13 seats, including one reserved for minorities, five went to Kurdish parties - the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). In 2021, Kurdish parties won six seats in Kirkuk - three PUK, two KDP, and one the New Generation Movemenet (NGM).
"Kurdish people are all upset. Five seats is a very, very low number for us. We intended to achieve seven seats. We do not know why it happened this way," said Sulaiman Mohammed, a Kurdish resident of Kirkuk.
Mohammed Dwyz, another resident, blamed the Kurdish parties for not establishing a united front.
"We did not run for the election on a shared list. We lost a lot of votes because of the multiplicity of lists, which harmed Kirkuk. People slowly start to lose confidence," Dwyz said.
The PUK received over 178,000 votes in Kirkuk, double the number it won in the 2021 election, increasing its seats from three to four.
"If we had just had another few thousands of votes on the KDP's list, the KDP would win its second seat, meaning the number of Kurdish seats would rise to six," said Sherzad Samad, head of the election department at the PUK’s party office in Kirkuk.
Though the KDP's votes increased by over 4,000 compared with 2021, its seats dropped from two to one. New Generation did not win a Kirkuk seat in this election.
The surprise win in Kirkuk was the Takaddum Front, led by Mohammed al-Halbousi, a prominent Sunni politician and former speaker of the federal parliament. They secured second place with three seats.
"The massive increase in the number of the Takaddum Front's votes is suspicious. A few thousands of them are suspected to be not real," said PUK's Samad.
Many Kurds originally from Kirkuk who moved into the Kurdistan Region after Iraqi forces retook control of the province in 2017 returned to their home districts to cast their ballots, but one KDP official said not enough people made the trip.
"Between 15,000 and 20,000 voters of Kirkuk did not return to the city to vote, for whatever reason like lack of an organized plan for this matter. Anyways, this factor led to the seats," said Shakhawan Abdulla, KDP's lawmaker-elect in Kirkuk.
"As the KDP, the number of our votes has increased, but failed to meet the number required to obtain the second seat. The same thing for the PUK,” he added.