Militants vow to march on Baghdad
Washington considers drone missions in reply
BAGHDAD — Islamic militants who seized cities and towns vowed Thursday to march on Baghdad to settle old scores, joined by Saddam Hussein- era loyalists and other disaffected Sunnis capitalizing on the government’s political paralysis over the biggest threat to Iraq’s stability since the U. S. withdrawal.
Trumpeting their victory, the militants also declared they would impose Shariah law in Mosul and other areas they have captured.
In northern Iraq, Kurdish security forces moved to fill the power vacuum — taking over an airbase and other posts abandoned by the military in the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk. The move further raised concern the country could end up partitioned into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish zones.
U. S. President Barack Obama said Iraq will need more help from the United States, but he did not specify what it would be willing to provide. Senior U. S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Washington is considering whether to conduct drone missions in Iraq.
The UN Security Council met on the crisis, underscoring the growing international alarm over the stunning advances by fighters from the militant group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ( ISIL).
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki had asked parliament to declare a state of emergency that would give him and his Shiite- led government increased powers to run the country, but the lawmakers failed to assemble a quorum.
The ISIL, whose Sunni fighters have captured large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, aims to create an Islamic emirate spanning both sides of the border. It has pushed deep into parts of Iraq’s Sunni heartland once controlled by U. S. forces because police and military forces melted away after relatively brief clashes, including in Iraq’s second- largest city of Mosul.
In its statement, ISIL declared it would start implementing its strict version of Shariah law in Mosul and other regions it had overrun. It said women should stay in their homes for modesty reasons, warned it would cut off the hands of thieves, and told residents to attend daily prayers. It said Sunnis in the military and police should abandon their posts and “repent” or else “face only death.”
The ISIL’s spokesman vowed to take the fight into Baghdad.
“We will march toward Baghdad because we have an account to settle there,” he said.
Baghdad does not appear to be in imminent danger of a similar assault, although Sunni insurgents have stepped up car bombings and suicide attacks in the capital recently.
With its large Shiite population, Baghdad would be a far harder target for the militants. So far, they have stuck to the Sunni heartland and former Sunni insurgent strongholds where people are already alienated by al- Maliki’s government.
The sudden collapse of Iraqi forces in the face of the militant seizure of Iraq’s second- largest city, Mosul, has created a crisis in Washington as the White House struggles to prevent terrorist forces from destroying an American partner state and its American-equipped army. U. S. President Barack Obama made it clear Thursday that the “emergency situation in Iraq” requires an immediate military response.
“In our conversation with the Iraqis, there will be some short- term immediate things that need to be done militarily and our national security team is looking at all the options,” he said in a brief news conference after a meeting with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
The exact nature of the response is not clear, but Obama indicated that it could include help from allies.
Eleven years after the U. S. attacked Iraq in Operation Iraqi Freedom, warnings that the invasion would inflame the region and spark an explosion of extremist groups appear to be coming true.
Once again the U. S. appears caught off guard by the sudden retreat of the Iraqi army in the face of the Sunni terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, which has blossomed into an efficient, motorized army.
The ISIL successes raise questions about the calibre of Obama’s intelligence, his national security team and whether for political reasons he was too eager to pull U. S. troops out of the region.
Questioned by reporters Thursday, Obama appeared slightly strained even as he struggled to maintain his customary composure.
He said the U. S. has, over the last year, provided the Iraqi government with military equipment and intelligence assistance.
“But what we’ve seen over the last couple of days indicates the degree to which Iraq’s going to need more help,” he said. “It’s going to need more help from us and it’s going to need more help from the international community.”
Obama said his national security team is “working around the clock” to identify what kind of assistance would be most effective.
“I don’t rule out anything because we do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria,” he said.
He called the sudden success of ISIL “a wake- up call for the Iraqi government.”
And he blamed the insurgency on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki, claiming his policy of excluding Sunnis from his government inflamed simmering sectarian conflict.
“There has to be a political component to this so that Sunni and Shia who care about building a functioning state that can bring about security and prosperity to all people inside of Iraq come together and work diligently against these extremists,” he said.
The U. S. has sent deputy
This thing is going to degenerate into a regional cataclysm.
JAMES JEFFREY
FORMER U. S. AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ
assistant secretary of state Brett McGurk to Iraq to evaluate the political and military situation.
“The situation is certainly very grave on the ground,” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters. “We are working with Iraqi leaders from across the country to support a co- ordinated response. You can expect that we will provide additional assistance to the Iraqi government to combat the threat from ISIL.”
When it was pointed out that the U. S. has had 10 years to train the Iraqi army, she said simply that Iraq “remains a crucial partner in our fight against terrorism.”
One official said the U. S. is reluctant to begin air strikes without ground intelligence from the U. S. military. Former U. S. ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey noted that air strikes could easily stop ISIL’s advance by destroying its mobility and heavy weapons.
Speaking on MSNBC, Jeffrey predicted the ISIL would attempt to encircle Baghdad, which could lead the Kurds to split off from Iraq and also bring in Iran to aid the Shias against the ISIL onslaught. “This thing is going to degenerate into a regional cataclysm,” he said.
Meanwhile, political battles broke out in Congress, where Obama came under attack from all sides for not predicting the sudden collapse of Iraqi government forces in the north and for pulling U. S. troops out of Iraq before the terrorist threat had been neutralized.
Republican Sen. John McCain told the senate: “Iraq’s terrorists have become a full- blown army” while Obama “fiddles.”
“Every hour the options become fewer and fewer,” McCain added.
House Speaker John Boehner, also a Republican, said: “It’s not like we haven’t seen over the last five or six months these terrorists moving in. … They are 100 miles from Baghdad and what’s the president doing? Taking a nap.”
Emerging from a classified briefing on the Iraqi crisis, Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine, who sits on the foreign relations committee, defended Obama, claiming that “nobody in ( the) administration contemplated that Iraqi security forces would simply collapse.”
He urged the president, however, “to come forward with a proposal and bring it to Congress and let us debate on what we should do.”
U. S. forces once held ISIL leader Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi in prison in Iraq for four years. After his release he disappeared. Since then he has fought in Syria, slowly building his forces into a ruthless army of ideologues that even al- Qaida found too violent.
According to Jeffrey, individual wealthy Arabs supplied ISIL’s initial finances. With the capture of Iraqi cities, their armories and their treasuries, the ISIL is now largely selffinancing and well armed.