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| U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, meets with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, right, at the Prime Minister's office in Baghdad on Monday, June 23, 2014. Kerry flew to Baghdad on Monday to meet with Iraq's leaders and personally urge the Shiite-led government to give more power to political opponents before a Sunni insurgency seizes more control across the country and sweeps away hopes for lasting peace. |
BAGHDAD (AP)
-- Warning of the "existential threat" posed by Sunni militants,
Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday the U.S. is prepared to take
military action even if Baghdad delays political reforms, noting that
the risks of letting the insurgency run rampant threaten dangers beyond
Iraq's borders.
But he stressed military action would not be in support of the present Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Kerry,
on a few hours' visit to Baghdad, urged Iraq's leaders to quickly set
aside divisions as the only means of stopping the vicious Sunni
insurgency and said Iraq's future depended on choices Iraq's leaders
make in the next days and weeks.
"The future
of Iraq depends primarily on the ability of Iraq's leaders to come
together and take a stand united against ISIL," Kerry told a news
conference, using the acronym for the al-Qaida-breakaway group, the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, that has captured huge swathes of
Iraqi territory in the north and west.
"Not
next week, not next month, but now," he said. "It is essential that
Iraq's leaders form a genuinely inclusive government as rapidly as
possible."
It was a dire warning to leaders of
Iraq's bitterly divided Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities that came
at a time when the Middle Eastern nation was facing its worst crisis
since the withdrawal of U.S. forces in late 2011 after eight years in
Iraq.
The Sunni fighters have virtually erased Iraq's western border with Syria and also taken territory on the frontier with Jordan.
Noting
the dangers the Sunni militants pose to Iraq and the region, Kerry said
the U.S. was prepared to take military action if necessary even before a
new government is formed.
"That's why, again,
I reiterate, the president will not be hampered if he deems it
necessary, if the formation is not complete," he said, referring to
Iraqi efforts to form a government that bridges the deep divisions among
the majority Shiites and minority Sunnis, Kurds and other groups.
Kerry
stressed, however, that if military action is taken - President Barack
Obama has said he is considering airstrikes - "it has nothing to do with
support for a specific government."
"It's not
specifically support for the existing prime minister or for one sect or
another," Kerry said. "It will be against ISIL, because ISIL is a
terrorist organization, and I think everybody today that we talked to
understood the urgency."
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-Maliki's predicament. Their latest victories considerably
expanded territory under their control just two weeks after the group
started swallowing up chunks of northern Iraq, heightening pressure on
al-Maliki to step aside.
Their offensive in
the north and west takes the group closer to its dream of carving out an
Islamic state straddling both Syria and Iraq. Controlling the borders
with Syria will help it supply fellow fighters there with weaponry
looted from Iraqi warehouses, boosting its ability to battle beleaguered
Syrian government forces.
The creation of
such a vast safe haven would serve as a magnet for jihadis from across
the world, much like al-Qaida did in the 1990s in Taliban-ruled
Afghanistan. Already, the Islamic State's battlefield successes in Syria
and more recently in Iraq have sent tremors across the region, jolting
neighboring countries into action over fears that the Sunni militants
may set their sights on them next.
In Jordan,
Iraq's neighbor to the west, the army dispatched reinforcements to its
border with Iraq last week to boost security, while in Lebanon police
busted a suspected sleeper cell allegedly linked to the Islamic State
militants in raids on two hotels in central Beirut.
Kerry
offered few details of his closed-door meetings in Baghdad. But he said
each of the officials he met with - including al-Maliki - committed to
the newly elected parliament holding its inaugural session by the end of
June.
Iraq's constitution says parliament
must convene by June 30, when lawmakers must elect a speaker, a position
that has traditionally gone to a Sunni. The chamber will then have 30
days to elect a president - traditionally a Kurd - who will have 15 days
to ask the leader of the majority in the 328-seat legislature to form a
government. Then a prime minister will be picked.
Al-Maliki's
coalition, State of the law, won 92 seats in the April 30 election, the
most by any single group.
While that would have normally placed him in a
strong position to lead a coalition government, there is a growing
consensus among his former Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni allies to deny him a
third term because of what they see as his monopoly on decision-making,
his perceived sectarian policies toward the Sunnis and Kurds, and the
military setbacks of the past two weeks.
Kerry,
echoing comments made by Obama last week, said no country - including
the U.S. - should try to pick new leadership for Iraq. "That is up to
the people of Iraq," he said. However, Iraqi officials briefed on the
Kerry-al-Maliki talks say the pressure has increased on the prime
minister to step down.
Al-Maliki, they said,
urged the United States during his talks with Kerry to start airstrikes
against the Sunni militants in territory under their control in the
mostly Sunni north and west. Kerry's response was that the United States
needed to move with extreme caution to avoid civilian casualties and
not appear to be targeting Sunnis, they said.
Also
during the meeting, according to the officials, the United States
appeared to be linking any military action on guarantees that a
genuinely inclusive government would come to office in Baghdad.
The officials agreed to discuss the substance of the talks only on condition of anonymity.
Obama,
in a round of television interviews in the U.S., said al-Maliki and the
Iraqi leadership face a test as to whether "they are able to set aside
their suspicions, their sectarian preferences for the good of the
whole."
"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," Obama said.
Al-Maliki's
Shiite-led government long has faced criticism of discriminating
against Iraq's Sunni and Kurdish populations. But it is his perceived
marginalization of the once-dominant Sunnis that sparked violence
reminiscent of Iraq's darkest years of sectarian warfare in 2006 and
2007.
In the latest evidence of the deadly
turmoil roiling Iraq, suspected Sunni militants stormed the house of a
government-backed Sunni militiaman, his wife, son, daughter, sister and a
cousin in Tarmiyah, a town 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Baghdad,
police and hospital officials said. The anti-al-Qaida militia, known as
"Sahwa" or "Awakening," was set up by the Americans to fight al-Qaida in
2007.
The Iraqi government later took over
the militias, incorporating many of them in the security forces. They
have been revived to combat the re-emergence of the Sunni militants over
the past year.
