‘Muslim nations must lead in counterterror’
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, Feb 21, (Agencies): A prominent Saudi prince said Sunday that Muslim countries need to take the lead in fighting terrorism and that a recently announced Islamic counterterrorism alliance of 34 nations should have been created sooner.
Prince Turki al-Faisal’s comments come as the kingdom hosts an 18-day military exercise with 20 members of the new alliance, which includes Pakistan, Sudan, Jordan and neighboring Gulf states. Defense Ministers from the coalition of Muslimmajority countries are scheduled to hold their first meeting in Saudi Arabia sometime in March.
“I consider this a leading and commendable step that should have happened sooner and thank God it has taken place,” he told reporters in Abu Dhabi.
“It’s no secret, unfortunately, that in our world today the majority of terrorism-related acts, its victims are Muslim,” he said. “Therefore, it is our responsibility as Muslim countries to play the primary role in fighting this disease that has impacted us all.”
Notably absent from the coalition is the kingdom’s regional rival Iran, as well as Syria and Iraq, which are battling to win back swaths of territory controlled by the Islamic State group.
Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia and Shiite-majority Iran are fiercely divided on a host of issues and support opposite sides of the wars in Yemen and Syria.
Relations worsened after the execution of a popular Shiite cleric in Saudi Arabia last month, which triggered protests in Iran and the ransacking of the Saudi Embassy and another diplomatic mission there. The two countries then severed diplomatic and trade ties.
Prince Turki said “the ball is in the Iranian court” when it comes to any hope of improving ties.
“The kingdom of Saudi Arabia has
expressed publicly that Iran’s interference in the affairs of Arab states is a situation that is unacceptable,” he said.
The prince, who does not hold an official position in the government, is an influential and outspoken member of the Saudi royal family. He headed Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Directorate for more than two decades until Sept 1, 2001, and held ambassador posts to the US, the UK and Ireland.
As fighting in Iraq raged last summer, Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani came across unexpected opposition to his plans to defeat Islamic State.
Soleimani is the commander of Iran’s al-Quds brigade and has been a key figure in the fight against the Sunni Islamist group in Iraq. That fight has been led not by Iraq’s army but by Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias.
But in August, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told Soleimani that a planned assault on the Sunni city of Ramadi should be left to the Iraqi army, according to a government official and two diplomats.
Abadi, a 64-year-old Shi’ite, wanted the militias to stay away to avoid inflaming ethnic tensions, the sources said.
Abadi’s office declined to comment on the story, which has been repeated in Baghdad’s diplomatic circles for months. Three Iraqi politicians denied it ever happened.
But the government official and the diplomats said the incident was one of a series of moves by Abadi to assert his authority as leader and to distance himself from Tehran and the militias that came to Baghdad’s rescue in 2014 and early 2015.
Abadi has begun to push for reconciliation between Iraq’s Shi’ites and Sunnis, and for better relations with Sunni Arab neighbours like Saudi Arabia, they said.
If he can bridge the gap between rival sectarian communities as he has promised, he will have gone a long way towards reuniting a country which has been deeply riven since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
According to the government official and the two diplomats, Abadi also objected to Soleimani’s plane landing at Baghdad airport without prior permission. Abadi was also irritated that Soleimani used an official VIP hall at the airport when entering Iraq, even though he was not officially invited by the government.
The deterioration in their relationship, the sources said, began in August when
Soleimani attended a top Iraqi security meeting run by Abadi and behaved in, what one source said, was “a bossy manner as if Iraq was an Iranian protectorate”.
This, the sources said, had led Abadi to ask Soleimani why he was at the meeting. The Iranian general had then left.
“Abadi questioned his presence. It was a matter of Iraqi sovereignty and nationalism,” one Western diplomat said. Abadi’s office declined to comment.
The Iraqi government official said Abadi and Soleimani had not fought but were “keeping an operational, business-like relationship. We can’t say it’s warm”.
Whatever the case, Soleimani has receded from public view in Iraq in the past six months. The omnipresent posters and television images of him on the battlefield have all but disappeared.
There are likely to be limits to that change. Iran’s allies within Abadi’s Shi’ite camp are pushing back against his more muscular stance, while the collapse in oil prices has cut the government budget, said Hisham al-Hashemi, an Iraqi government adviser and an expert on Islamic State.
For now though, Abadi seems to be trying to deliver on his initial address to parliament in 2014 in which he painted a vision of a decentralised and united Iraq.
The army’s victory in Ramadi against the ultra-hardline Sunni militant group was a key moment.
An elite corps of the Iraqi army dislodged Islamic State from the city, the largest in western Iraq, in the final days of 2015. Support came from US warplanes while Sunni tribesmen held the ground behind the army lines.