London: A spokesman for the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki said he will not stand down as a condition of US air strikes against Sunni militants who have made a lightning advance across the country.
Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, on Wednesday made a public call on Al Arabiya television for the US to launch strikes but Barack Obama has come under pressure from senior US politicians to persuade Al Maliki, a Shiite who has pursued sectarian policies, to step down over what they see as failed leadership in the face of an insurgency.
Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, told a hearing on Wednesday that Al Maliki’s government “has got to go if you want any reconciliation”, and Republican John McCain called for the use of US air power but also urged Obama to “make very clear to Al Maliki that his time is up”.
The White House has not called for Al Maliki to go but spokesman Jay Carney said that whether Iraq was led by Al Maliki or a successor, “We will aggressively attempt to impress upon that leader the absolute necessity of rejecting sectarian governance.”
Al Maliki’s spokesman, Zuhair Al Nahar, said on Thursday that the west should immediately support the Iraqi government’s military operation against Isil rather than demand a change of government. He insisted that Al Maliki had “never used sectarian tactics”.
“Our focus needs to be on urgent action air support, logistic support, counter-intelligence support to defeat these terrorists who are posing a real danger to the stability of Iraq, to the whole region,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
Obama is said still to be weighing military options, and US officials for days have quietly signalled that a decision is not imminent.
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, confirmed that the US had received the request for air strikes but said that the fluid state of the Iraqi battlefield had left the US with incomplete intelligence, a factor that made an air campaign more difficult. “It’s not as easy as looking at an iPhone video of a convoy and then striking it,” he told senators.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
