Iraq’s new president has charged Iraqi Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Haider al-Abadi with forming a new government in the next 30 days.
Iraqi President Fouad Massoum said on television yesterday that he hoped al-Abadi would succeed in forming a government that would “protect the Iraqi people.”
Massoum’s choice is a very public snubbing of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who in an angry midnight speech on Sunday all but demanded he be renominated for a third term.
Photo: Reuters
Al-Maliki has deployed his elite security forces in Baghdad and partially closed two main streets commonly used to hold for pro and anti-government rallies, as hundreds of his supporters took to the streets of the capital.
A member of al-Maliki’s political bloc yesterday said “we will not stay silent” over Massoum’s decision to ask al-Abadi to replace al-Maliki and form a new government.
“The nomination is illegal and a breach of the constitution. We will go to the federal court to object to the nomination,” said Hussein al-Maliki, the prime minister’s son-in-law.
Nouri al-Maliki has rejected calls by Sunnis, Kurds, fellow Shiites and regional power broker Iran to step aside to make way for a less polarizing figure who can unite Iraqis against a raging Sunni insurgency.
Amid the rampant advance of the Islamic State militant group, the US has begun urgently shipping arms and ammunition to the Iraqi Kurdish forces battling the extremists, US Department of State spokeswoman Marie Harf said yesterday.
“We’re working with the government of Iraq to increasingly and very quickly get urgently needed arms to the Kurds,” Harf told CNN. “This includes the Iraqis providing their own weapons from their own stocks and we’re working to do the same thing from our stocks of weapons that we have.”
Harf said the effort had been underway since last week, but did not say which US agency was leading it or how many and what type of weapons had been sent.
The US has a consulate and other facilities in Erbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and last week, US President Barack Obama announced air strikes to protect the city from the militants’ advance.
Efforts to support Kurdish peshmerga fighters could complicated Washington’s ties to Baghdad, which is also fighting the Islamic State, but has tense relations with Erbil.
However, Harf insisted that, in the current crisis, the two are working together.
“We have seen an unprecedented level of cooperation between the Iraqi forces and the Kurdish forces. We hadn’t seen that in the past,” Harf said. “So any way we can get the very urgently needed arms to the Kurds we are actively working on.”
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