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| Iraqi insurgents militants stand with captured Iraqi army Himvee at a vehicle checkpoint. Photograph: AP |
Barack Obama announced on Thursday that a contingent up to 300 “military advisers” will be sent to help Iraq's beleaguered army repel the advance of Sunni insurgents, but insisted the US would not be dragged into another bloody war in the country.
The troops, drawn from US special operations forces, will assist the Iraqi military to develop and execute a counter-offensive against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis). Their mission is likely to spread to the selection of targets for any future air strikes, but Obama stopped short of accepting a plea from Baghdad to order US air power into the skies over Iraq immediately.
Instead, Obama said the option of air strikes would be held in reserve. Any such strikes would be “targeted” and “precise”, Obama said, warning that the fate of the country “hangs in the balance”.
The fighting continued in Iraq on Thursday as Isis militants fought Iraqi troops in an intense battle the at the Baiji oil refinery. The facility, the country's largest, is between the cities of Mosul and Tikrit, both seized by Isis last week.
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| Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, has marginalized other Iraqi groups and has been widely blamed for the ballooning Sunni insurgency. |
Alarmed over the Sunni insurgent mayhem convulsing Iraq, the country’s political leaders are actively jockeying to replace Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Iraqi officials said Thursday.
The political leaders have been encouraged by what they see as newfound American support for replacing Mr. Maliki with someone more acceptable to Iraq’s Sunnis and Kurds, as well as to the Shiite majority, the officials said.
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On October 2011, Barack Obama and his national security committee sat
down for the most important conference call they had held on Iraq. On the videolink from Baghdad was Nouri al-Maliki, a man whom the US had backed as a second-term leader a year earlier....
Maliki sat with only a translator. He wanted no discussion about an extension of the US presence in
Iraq, not even a token contribution for training or mentoring. Maliki's
stance was welcomed by many in the room, who viewed Iraq as a
politically consuming misadventure.But they were just as surprised as the hawks at the Iraqi leader's defiance. After eight long years, most of them as partners of sorts, it had come to this; there was no longer anything to negotiate. Maliki's Iraq would go it alone; the US could turn the lights off when it left.
Maliki wanted the safety in numbers that his Shia neighbours offered. While embracing Iran, Maliki put distance between his government and Iraq's Sunni minority, arresting several tribal leaders, laying siege to a protest camp in Ramadi, and brazenly issuing an arrest warrant for the Sunni former vice-president Tariq al-Hashimi days after US forces left.
He set about co-opting key institutions left behind by the Americans; the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, which was soon stacked with officials from his Dawa party, and Iraq's elite special forces unit, which became his praetorian guard.
Some in Washington started believing that Maliki's moves were consolidating power along nakedly sectarian lines.
The embattled leader has sensed the change in mood and on Wednesday said he would not resign in return for US airstrikes against insurgents.
The move away from Maliki is precipitous. In testimony to the Senate on Wednesday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, said repeatedly that the Iraqi government had failed on its commitment to combat sectarianism.
More ominously for a government that urgently seeks US military aid, Dempsey and the defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, told a Senate panel already champing at the bit for the Iraqi prime minister's downfall that military intervention would be futile without concerted action from Maliki to embrace Sunnis.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the Bush-era US ambassador who assiduously helped install the then-obscure Maliki as leader in 2006, told reporters that Iran could help the US persuade Shia politicians to "make a change" by replacing Maliki. This may yield yet further common ground for the arch foes who, not long ago, fought a vicious proxy war in Iraq, and now seem increasingly drawn together by a common threat.
Iran has yet to declare its hand about who should lead Iraq. However, the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, long a kingmaker in Baghdad, has an increasingly dim view of Maliki. "He says the man's an idiot," a senior Iraqi politician who met Suleimani last week told the Guardian