with the Kurds. In 1970, Saddam traveled to Kurdistan to conclude an accord with Mulla Mustafa. A truly democratic, federalist, and equitable 15-point agreement was reached, and the accord concluded with the statement "History will bear witness that you [the Kurds] did not have and never will have as sincere a brother and dependable an ally as the Arab people." The peace didn't last long. As might be expected, the earliest obstacle was the demographic one. In 1972, when the government proposed to apply the 1957 census figures to Kirkuk, Mullah Mustafa rejected it, knowing that it would show the Iraqi Turkmen were the majority in the city – and given the events of 1959, the Turkmen were likely to prefer Ba'ath rule to Kurdish. Mulla Mustafa refused to close the border with Iran as he had agreed to, and appealed to the United States for aid despite promising not to seek outside assistance. Moreover, by mid-September 1972 Mulla Mustafa was receiving a US$50,000 stipend from Israel to distract and undermine the Ba'ath. Meanwhile, the government nationalized the country's oil facilities, provoking Kurdish fears that they would lose out on their own oil resources. Rhetoric on both sides intensified, and there were clashes in Kirkuk and Sinjar. Mulla Mustafa boasted to the Washington Post in June 1973: "We are ready to act according to US policy, if the US protect us from the wolves. In the even of sufficient support we should be able to control the Kirkuk oilfields and confer exploitation rights on an American company." Negotiations dragged on, but Mulla Mustafa was unwilling to budge on Kirkuk – despite being advised to do so by his own European advisors. Emboldened by offers of support from the US, Israel, and Iran, Mulla Mustafa allowed the deadline to expire. This caused several high-ranking KDP Politburo members to defect to the Iraqi National Front in Baghdad. The most significant of these defections was that of Mulla Mustafa's eldest son, Ubayd Allah Barzani, who claimed that his father "does not want self-rule to be implemented even if he were given Kirkuk and all of its oil. His acceptance of the law will take everything from him, and he wants to remain absolute ruler," further condemning his father for failing to implement agrarian reform. Around this same time a section of the KDP (led by Hashim Aqrawi, Ahmad Muhammad Saeed al-Atrushi and Barzanis