Kurdish government

Iraq's central bank on Wednesday eased financial restrictions imposed on the Kurdistan region over its independence vote after receiving a pledge of cooperation from Kurdish banks, an Iraqi banking source said.

All but four Kurdish-owned banks were allowed to resume dollar and foreign currency transfers on Wednesday, the source told Reuters.

A number of international carriers have announced they would halt flights to the Iraqi Kurdish region this week at the request of Baghdad, including Lebanese and Egyptian national carriers. 

Turkish Airlines has announced its flights would continue for now, as any formal request was not delivered to the company yet from Iraqi authorities. 

People in Iraq’s autonomous region of Kurdistan are voting in an independence referendum, amid rising tensions and international opposition.

Polls opened at 05:00 GMT with balloting also taking place in the disputed areas between the northern city of Erbil and the capital Baghdad, as well as the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, which is ethnically mixed.

A series of Turkish airstrikes targeting American-allied Kurdish militias in Iraq and Syria threaten to put Turkey and the United States on a “collision course,” experts have warned.

Israel has reportedly purchased as much as 77 percent of its oil supplies from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, providing them with an essential source of funding in their campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a new report in the Financial Times revealed on Aug. 24.

Iraq's Kurdish regional government called on the outlawed Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) to "withdraw" from Iraq's Kurdish territory Aug. 1 to prevent civilian deaths amid a campaign of Turkish airstrikes targeting the group.

The regional Kurdish government in Arbil has the right to sell its own oil if Baghdad does not uphold its part of an oil agreement, the Iraqi Kurdish administration?s parliament speaker said May 30.

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq will increase its oil exports to Turkey and deliver up to 625,000 barrels per day starting from June, an official from the KRG parliament announced on April 29.

The U.S. State Department has denied supplying U.S. arms to Kurdish forces defending the besieged town of Kobane, insisting that any supplies are from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq.
      
"The United States is not providing U.S. arms to the PYD [the Democratic Union Party]," a department official told the Anadolu Agency on Dec. 9.
      

Iraq's government reached a formal agreement on Dec. 2 with Kurdish regional authorities to end a protracted dispute over oil exports and budget payments to the semi-autonomous Kurdish region.