Iraq Is Moving Towards A Major Challenge-al-Abadi

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al-Abadi
al-Abadi

The Iraqi parliament on Tuesday rejected Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s candidates for the defence and interior ministries, despite his plea for a speedy decision.

al-Abadi
al-Abadi

“The country is moving towards a major challenge,” al-Abadi, who last week formed a unity government vowing to take on the extremists of Islamic State, told lawmakers.

“A postponement will only make the issue more complicated,” the premier said in response to deputies who asked for more time to consider the candidates.

Al-Abadi had promised the parliament to propose candidates for the two key security posts within a week of the rest of his government being approved last week.

But deputies voted down Jaber al-Jaberi of the cross-sectarian Iraqiyya bloc and Riyadh Gharib of the Shiite National Alliance, by a narrow margin.

Speaker Salim al-Jabouri said a new vote would be held on Thursday. Al-Abadi said he would hold further discussions with political parties on the matter.

The parliament building had seen tense scenes earlier in the day as relatives of soldiers massacred by Islamic State fighters tried to storm in, Alsumaria News reported.

In mid-June, days into the lightning offensive in which it seized swathes of northern and western Iraq, the Islamic State said it had executed 1,700 Shiite soldiers captured at Camp Speicher near Tikrit.

The jihadist group published photographs showing large numbers of young men in civilian clothing being loaded into trucks, marched to a patch of waste ground, made to lie down in rows and shot.

The US military said it had conducted airstrikes against the Islamic State near Baghdad for the first time. US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel warned that the fight against the Sunni extremist group “will not be an easy or brief effort.”

The US military is refining and finalizing plans to expand the fight against the militants into Syria and will brief President Barack Obama on the plans Wednesday, Hagel told a Senate hearing.

The plan will include strikes against Islamic State safe havens, including command and control structures, logistics capabilities and infrastructure.

“We are at war with ISIL, as we are with al-Qaeda,” Hagel said, using an alternate acronym for the terrorist group. Hagel warned that “if left unchecked, ISIL will directly threaten our homeland and our allies.”

The US Central Command earlier said that it deployed attack aircraft in a strike Monday in support of Iraqi government troops fighting the al-Qaeda splinter group south-west of Baghdad.

The airstrike was the first in “expanded efforts beyond protecting our own people and humanitarian missions to hit [Islamic State] targets as Iraqi forces go on offense, as outlined in the president’s speech” last week, the military said.

The statement said the strike had destroyed an Islamic State fighting position that was firing on Iraqi soldiers outside Baghdad.

The US has conducted 162 airstrikes across Iraq since early August, most of which have targeted nothern areas, the Central Command said.

Neighbouring Turkey is drawing up plans for a possible buffer zone along the country’s borders with Iraq and Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was quoted by local media as saying.

Erdogan says the leadership will still need to decide if the zones are necessary.

Turkey is under pressure to clamp down on foreign fighters crossing the border into Syria and to prevent Iraqi oil from entering the country illegally.

United Nations investigators meanwhile said that UN Security Council inaction has nourished the Islamic State jihadists and allowed the Syrian conflict to spread to Iraq.

“This inaction has allowed the warring parties to operate with impunity and nourished the violence that has consumed Syria,” chief Syria investigator Paulo Sergio Pinheiro said.

“In failing to search for peace, Syria has been moved further and further into a war that has spilled over into Lebanon and Iraq and is threatening the entire region and beyond,” he added.

GNA

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