ERBIL, Iraq â€" Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, has been on self-imposed gardening leave for the past few weeks, having moved from Baghdad to his native Kurdistan as part of a Kurdish boycott of the central government.
Along with Khayrullah Hassan Babaker, the trade minister and fellow Kurd, and Kurdish members of the national Parliament, he left his post in the Iraqi capital as a signal of Kurdish discontent over deteriorating relations with the government of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite prime minister.
With Mr. Maliki now confronting a renewal of sectarian conflict with the Sunni community after ordering a violent crackdown on Sunni protests this month, he appears to have decided it is time to patch up his differences with the autonomous Kurdish region.
After talks in Baghdad with a high-level Kurdish delegation this week, he has decided to make a rare trip north to Erbil in about 10 days for further talks on divisive security and budget issues, senior Kurdish officials told Rendezvous.
In turn, Mr. Zebari and his colleagues will resume their functions in Baghdad.
The deal follows a week in which the Kurdish Regional Government (K.R.G.) unilaterally sent its soldiers to deploy around the disputed city of Kirkuk.
According to Kurdish officials, they were sent to fill a security vacuum left by Iraqi Army units, which had abandoned their positions for fear of retaliation after the army attacked a Sunni protest camp in Kirkuk province.
The territory governed by the K.R.G. has been mercifully spared the sectarian violence that has gripped the rest of the country for much of the decade since the 2003 U.S-led invasion that toppled the government of Saddam Hussein.
Kurdistan, with its own government and its own army, exists as a virtual state with a state and is enjoying unprecedented prosperity for a region that was once the most impoverished and repressed in the country.
Kurdish officials acknowledged that with the rest of Iraq now threatened by a renewal of strife between Sunni and Shiite â€" April saw 460 violent deaths in sectarian conflicts â€" there was a temptation for Kurds to wish a plague on both sets of their Arab neighbors.
The officials privately blame the upsurge on Mr. Maliki’s crackdown on Sunnis, which they say is inspired by his fear of Sunni fundamentalism spreading across the border from Syria.
Many Kurds now say they would be better off with an independent state rather than continuing to be tied to a failing Iraq. Officials insist, however, that neither Kurdish independence nor the disintegration of Iraq would allow the Kurds to escape the current realities of the region.
“This is a civil war,†said one high-ranking official, who asked not to be named, describing the tensions between Sunni and Shiite. “But for the Kurds, a stable Iraq is vital for their interests.â€
If the Kurds of Iraq cannot turn their back on the situation in their own country, neither can they ignore developments in neighboring Turkey and Syria.
They are closely watching developments in the peace process between Turkey and the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) Under a cease-fire deal, P.K.K. fighters will leave Turkey for the isolated Qandil Mountains of Iraq where the military leadership is already established.
Kurdish officials said they welcomed the peace agreement but were alert to the dangers of hosting militants who no longer have a war to fight in their own land.
Syrian refugees â€" both Kurds and Arabs â€" have meanwhile been arriving in Iraqi Kurdistan to escape the conflict in their country.
Iraqi Kurdish officials say they have also been providing unspecified assistance to Kurdish groups in Syria to secure areas they control in order to keep out Qaeda-linked elements within the Syrian rebel movement.
Surveying the current geopolitical dilemmas facing the Iraqi Kurds, the high-ranking official said, “The Iraqi and Syrian theaters are merging into one. Everything is related.â€
