Iraq yesterday pressed a counter-offensive to repel militants who have seized vast swathes of territory as former UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi blamed the crisis on global neglect of Syria’s civil war.
Washington responded to the sweeping unrest by deploying an aircraft carrier to the Gulf, but Iran has warned against foreign military intervention in its Shiite neighbor, voicing confidence that Baghdad is able to repel the onslaught.
The militants, spearheaded by the powerful Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) jihadist group, have overrun all of one province and chunks of three more since they launched their offensive late on Monday last week.
Security forces have generally performed poorly, with some abandoning their vehicles and positions and discarding their uniforms, though they seem to have begun to recover from the initial onslaught and have started to regain ground.
Iraqi commanders said security forces are now starting to push the militants back, and that soldiers have recaptured two towns north of Baghdad.
They will be joined by a flood of volunteers, urged on by a call to arms from top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
A recruitment center for such volunteers at the town of Khales in central Iraq came under mortar attack yesterday, leaving six people dead, including three Iraqi soldiers, said police and a doctor.
US President Barack Obama said he was “looking at all the options” to halt the offensive that has brought the militants within 80km of Baghdad’s city limits, but ruled out any return of US combat troops.
Washington has also ordered aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush into the Gulf in response to the crisis.
Iran yesterday warned that “any foreign military intervention in Iraq” would only complicate the crisis, while Germany warned of a potential “proxy war” in the region.
“Iraq has the capacity and necessary preparations for the fight against terrorism and extremism,” foreign ministry spokesman Marzieh Afkham was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said a day earlier that Iran had not been asked for help by its neighbor.
However, in surprise comments he added that Iran may consider cooperating with its arch-foe the US to fight the militants in Iraq.
“If we see that the United States takes action against terrorist groups in Iraq, then one can think about it,” he said, despite the lack of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington for more than three decades.
Brahimi, the former UN and Arab League envoy to Syria, said the international community’s negligence of the conflict in neighboring Syria had precipitated the crisis in Iraq.
“It is a well-known rule: A conflict of this kind [in Syria] cannot stay confined within the borders of one country,” Brahimi said.
The international community “unfortunately neglected the Syrian problem and did not help to resolve it. This is the result,” said Brahimi, who resigned from his post as UN-Arab League representative to Syria last month.
As Iraq troops began to drive back the militants, they found grisly scenes, amid reports that the militants had carried out summary executions of Iraqi security forces members they captured.
Troops found the burned bodies of 12 policemen as they recaptured the town of Ishaqi in Salaheddin Province from the insurgents, a police colonel and a doctor said.
Photographs posted online were also said to show militants summarily executing dozens of captured members of the security forces in the province.
However, the situation on the ground has been further complicated as forces from the autonomous Kurdish region have made territorial advances.
A senior official yesterday said that Kurdish peshmerga forces had taken control of one of two official border crossings with Syria earlier in the week.
Kurdish forces have also seized the disputed ethnically mixed northern city of Kirkuk and surrounding areas, as well as other areas.
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