Al-Rubaie bloom

The frequent and unannounced visits of the President of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, Negervan Barzani, to the United Arab Emirates have raised a number of questions about its significance and purposes, especially as it coincides with the ongoing and anti-Iraqi protests.

The last of these visits was a few days ago and was not announced officially, as Barzani met with a number of high-ranking UAE officials.

Shaho Al-Qarah Dagi saw the Iraqi protests topped the Barzani talks in the Emirates (Al-Jazeera)

Worried about the protests
Commenting on this, political researcher Shaho Al-Qarah Daghi said, "The last visit came based on an official invitation, which is the second for him after he assumed the position of president of the region last May, and this indicates a common will on both sides to strengthen political and commercial relations."

Al-Qara Daghi added that "the countries of the region, especially the Gulf, are concerned about the developments that have ravaged Iraq during the past two months because of the popular demonstrations that resulted from the resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, and the ambiguity of the alternatives available to assume this position."

He stressed that "these countries, including the UAE, consider the Kurdistan region as a stable region inside Iraq, and a major center of gravity that may contribute to drawing the next scenarios in Baghdad with regard to the political process or in the race to offer an alternative to the prime minister, especially after the visit of Mike Pence, US Vice President to Erbil without Traffic in Baghdad. "

As for the journalist, Diyarbakir, he told Al-Jazeera Net that the Kurdistan Regional Government was a beneficiary in the period of Abdul-Mahdi and the period that preceded it, as the region received significant gains such as employee salaries, an increase in its share of the general annual budget, peshmerga salaries, oil export facilities and other concessions.

He pointed out that Negervan Barzani's visit to the Emirates may carry political dimensions, especially as the UAE has an economic and political weight in the Middle East, and the two parties may have discussed through these visits the features of the current political scene or the repercussions of the current demonstrations.

Raad Hashem saw the character of Barzani’s visits as purely economic (Al-Jazeera)

Spiral effort
For his part, the Iraqi parliament member for the Future Bloc, Sarkot Shams al-Din, considered that Barzani’s visits to the Emirates are tourist and entertainment, during which he participated in the Formula race, but at the same time he was a lobbying effort he made to expand his personal relations with the Gulf princes at the expense of unemployed men and women in Iraq's Kurdistan region.

Shamsuddin said that "Barzani works as a businessman and needs a partnership with his counterparts in the Emirates, and he does not represent me and does not represent Iraq in general," and stressed the need for strict laws to hold them accountable for their foreign relations.

What Shams al-Din stated is not agreed with political analyst Raad Hashem, who believed that the reason for frequent visits is perhaps copying the UAE's experiences in the field of opening up to promising economic centers in order to develop capabilities and access to advanced levels through which the region seeks to access global markets through the portal of this country, Stressing that the visits do not have a political dimension, but a purely economic dimension.