Sharpars reported that the Kurdistan Region Prime Minister, Masrour Barzani, officially appointed Rebwar Talabani, the former chairman of the Kirkuk Provincial Council, as his advisor in an official decree.

Earlier, a Kirkuk court issued an arrest warrant for Talabani on corruption charges, but the sentence has not been carried out as Talabani lives in Erbil. The warrant issued after the independence 2017 referendum in the Kurdish regions of Iraq, including Kirkuk, where 93 percent of the voters voted they want to be a part of the Kurdistan Region.

Rebwar Talabani is a senior member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) but is known to be close to the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).

The KDP, of which Masrour Barzani is one of the senior members of its political bureau, declared that Kirkuk and other Kurdish disputed regions that are now under the control of the Iraqi forces as occupied after the October 16, 2017 events and the control of the Iraqi forces over the region and has since stopped all its activities in the province and the other areas which both Erbil and Baghdad claim authority over.

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