BAGHDAD (AP)
-- In a sign of Iran's deepening involvement in the Iraqi crisis, the
commander of Tehran's elite Quds Force is helping Iraq's military and
Shiite militias gear up to fight the Sunni insurgents who have advanced
across the country, officials said Monday.
Iranian
Gen. Ghasem Soleimani has been consulting in Iraq on how to roll back
the al-Qaida-breakaway group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant, according to Iraqi security officials.
In
its latest success, the group Monday seized the strategic city of Tal
Afar near the Syrian border, part of its goal of linking areas under its
control on both sides of the Iraq-Syria frontier. West of Baghdad, an
army helicopter was shot down during clashes near the city of Fallujah,
killing the aircraft's two-man crew, security officials said.
Soleimani's presence is likely to fuel longtime Sunni suspicions about the Shiite-led government's close ties with Tehran.
In
a further dramatic shift unthinkable only weeks ago, Washington says it
is willing to talk with Tehran on turning back the insurgents' advance
after years of trying to limit Iran's influence in Baghdad.
The security officials said the U.S. government was notified before Soleimani's visit.
Soleimani
has been inspecting Iraqi defenses and reviewing plans with top
commanders and Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militias, the officials said.
He has set up an operations room to coordinate the militias and visited
the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala south of Baghdad, home to the most
revered Shiite shrines, and areas west of Baghdad where government
forces have faced off with Islamic militants for months.
The
Islamic State has threatened to march to Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf,
and a call to arms Friday from Iraq's top Shiite cleric, the
Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, was mostly focused on the
need to defend the holy shrines.
Soleimani's
visit adds significantly to the sectarian slant of the mobilization by
the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Armed Shiite
militiamen have been parading on the streets and volunteers joining the
security forces are chanting Shiite religious slogans.
Al-Maliki
rejects charges of sectarianism and points to recruiting efforts by
some Sunni clerics, but there is no evidence of Sunnis joining the fight
against the Islamic State in significant numbers, if at all.
The
legitimacy accorded by his government to the Shiite militias poses a
risk of Iraq sliding back into the deadly sectarian bloodshed of 2006
and 2007.
Such tensions were rising months
before the Islamic State's lightning incursion of last week, with
thousands killed since late last year. Bombings killed Shiites and
members of the security forces as militants took hold of vast territory
and at least one city in the mainly Sunni Anbar province west of
Baghdad.
Soleimani is one of the most powerful
figures in Iran's security establishment, and his Quds Force is a
secretive branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guard involved in external
operations. In the mid-2000s, it organized Shiite militias in a campaign
against U.S. troops in Iraq, according to American officials. More
recently, it has been involved in helping Syrian President Bashar Assad
in his fight against Sunni rebels.
His visit
and the empowerment of the Shiite militias that his Quds Force trains
and arms means Iran could take a role in Iraq similar to the one it
plays in Syria. The Quds Force - along with Iraqi and Lebanese Shiite
fighters - has been crucial to the survival of Assad, himself a member
of a sect that is an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry said in an interview with Yahoo! News
that Washington is "open to discussions" with Tehran if the Iranians can
help end the violence and restore confidence in the Iraqi government.
U.S.
officials said earlier there is a possibility that a senior American
diplomat may discuss Iraq with an Iranian delegation at nuclear talks in
Vienna.
The Sunni militants' capture of the
city of Tal Afar was a key prize because it sits on a main highway
between Syria and Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, which the Islamic
State captured last week.
Farther south, the
ISIL militants battled government troops at Romanah, a village near
another main border crossing to Syria in Anbar province, according to a
security official in Baghdad. The official spoke on condition of
anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
The
Islamic State already controls territory in Syria in several regions
next to the Iraq border. Its fighters move relatively freely across the
porous, unprotected desert border, along with money, weapons and
equipment. Seizing an actual border crossing, however, would be a major
symbolic gain for the group.
Tal Afar has a
population of about 200,000 and is located 420 kilometers (260 miles)
northwest of Baghdad. Its residents are mostly ethnic Shiite and Sunni
Turkomen, raising fears of atrocities by Islamic State fighters, who
brand Shiites as heretics.
Over the weekend,
the group posted graphic photos purporting to show its fighters killing
scores of Iraqi soldiers captured when it overran other areas.
Tal
Afar Mayor Abdulal Abdoul said the city was taken just before dawn. One
resident, Hadeer al-Abadi, said militants in pickup trucks mounted with
machine guns and flying black jihadi banners roamed the streets as
gunfire rang out.
The local security force
fled before dawn, and local tribesman who continued to fight later
surrendered to the militants, al-Abadi said as he prepared to head out
of town with his family.
Another resident,
Haidar al-Taie, said a warplane dropped barrels packed with explosives
on militant positions inside the city Monday morning, and many Shiite
families had left the town shortly after fighting broke out a day
earlier.
"Residents are gripped by fear and
most of them have already left the town for areas held by Kurdish
security forces," al-Abadi said. The city lies just south of the
self-rule Kurdish region and many residents were fleeing to the
relatively safe territory, joining an influx of refugees from Mosul and
other areas that have been captured by the militants.
Some 3,000 others from Tal Afar fled west to the neighboring town of Sinjar.
