US Secretary of State John Kerry yesterday urged Iraq’s top Shiite leaders to give more government power to political opponents before a Sunni insurgency seizes more control across the country and sweeps away hopes for lasting peace.
The closed-door meeting between Kerry and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was not expected to be friendly, given that officials in Washington have floated suggestions that the Iraqi prime minister should resign as a necessary first step toward quelling the vicious uprising.
Nor will it likely bring any immediate, tangible results, as al-Maliki has shown no sign of stepping down and Iraqi officials have long listened to — but ultimately ignored — US advice to avoid appearing controlled by the decade-old specter of a US occupation in Baghdad.
Still, Kerry appeared encouraged after the discussion with al-Maliki, which ran for a little over 90 minutes and was held in the same complex where an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at former US president George W. Bush as an insult in 2008.
Walking to his motorcade after the meeting, Kerry said: “That was good.”
He was being escorted by Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs Hoshyar Zebari.
Kerry also met with influential Shiite cleric Ammar al-Hakim, as well as Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, the nation’s two highest-ranking Sunnis.
Iraqi officials briefed on the Kerry’s talks with the Iraqi prime minister said al-Maliki urged the US to target the militants’ positions in Iraq and Syria, citing training camps and convoys with airstrikes. The officials said Kerry responded by saying a great deal of care and caution must be taken before attacks are launched to avoid civilian casualties that could create the impression that the US is attacking Sunnis.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
US President Barack Obama, in a round of television interviews that aired yesterday in the US, said al-Maliki and the Iraqi leadership faces a test as to whether “they are able to set aside their suspicions, their sectarian preferences for the good of the whole.”
“And we don’t know,” Obama said. “The one thing I do know is that if they fail to do that, then no amount of military action by the United States can hold that country together.”
After suffering together through more than eight years of war — which killed nearly 4,500 US troops and more than 100,000 Iraqis — Washington and Baghdad are trying to shelve mutual wariness to curb the very real prospect of the Mideast nation falling into a fresh bout of sectarian strife.
A day earlier, in Cairo, Kerry said Iraq had reached a “critical moment” and urged leaders to rise above sectarian disputes to create a new government that gives more power to Sunnis and Kurds.
Both groups — which together make up about 40 percent of Iraq’s population — accuse al-Maliki of blocking them from holding equal authority in what is designed as a power-sharing government.
Kerry arrived in Baghdad just a day after the Sunni militants captured two key border posts, one along the frontier with Jordan and the other with Syria, deepening al-Malliki’s predicament.
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