"Some people say: 'The Kurds want their independence, so let them go away forever.' But our reply to them is: 'Iraq is ours, Iraq is our country," he said in a speech on Tuesday night at the end of a congress of his party.

The president of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq caused a stir at the start of the week-long congress of his Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) by calling for the right to self-determination.

For Iraq's Shiite and Sunni Arabs, whose leaders also attended Saturday's session, such a right for the minority non-Arab Kurds would spell a breakup of the country.

"My message to our Arab brothers, whether they are Sunni or Shiites, to our friends and allies ... is the following: we are committed to a federal and democratic Iraq, to its constitution," said Barzani.

"But we are not prepared to remain in an Iraq dominated by chauvinists," said the KDP leader, referring to the dictatorship of president Saddam Hussein, a longtime foe of the Kurds who was ousted in the 2003 US-led invasion.

The Kurds are "a nationality and therefore have the right to self-determination ... But the Kurdish parliament has decided stay on one condition: that Iraq should be a federal state," Barzani stressed.

Iraq's Kurdish north, made up of three provinces, exerts control over all areas of policy except for national defence and foreign affairs.

It is in dispute with Baghdad over two main issues: a land dispute centred on the ethnically mixed oil-rich city of Kirkuk and the distribution of revenues from the region's energy reserves.

The Kurdish capital of Arbil claims Kirkuk and parts of three neighbouring provinces and has signed its own deals with international energy firms without consulting Baghdad, both of which central government authorities contest.

The region first attained a modicum of autonomy in 1974, but Barzani's father and then-leader of the KDP, Mulla Mustafa Barzani, returned to war with the Baghdad government rather than accept that limited autonomy.

Kurdistan won greater freedom after the 1991 Gulf War.