BAGHDAD/WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – Iraq has asked the United States for air support in countering Sunni rebels, the top U.S. general said yesterday, after the militants seized major cities in a lightning advance that has routed the Shi’ite-led government’s army.
But General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave no direct reply when asked at a congressional hearing whether Washington would agree to the request.
Baghdad said it wanted U.S. airstrikes as the insurgents, led by fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, battled their way into the biggest oil refinery in Iraq and the president of neighbouring Iran raised the prospect of intervening in a sectarian war that threatens to sweep across Middle East frontiers.
“We have a request from the Iraqi government for air power,” Dempsey told a Senate hearing in Washington. Asked whether the United States should honour that request, he said: “It is in our national security interest to counter ISIL wherever we find them.”
U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Iraqi request had included drone strikes and increased surveillance by U.S. drones, which have been flying over Iraq for some time.
In the Saudi city of Jeddah, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Baghdad had asked for airstrikes “to break the morale” of ISIL.
While Iraq’s ally, Shi’ite Muslim power Iran, had so far not intervened to help the Baghdad government, “everything is possible”, he told reporters after a meeting of Arab foreign ministers.
U.S. President Barack Obama briefed congressional leaders on Wednesday on efforts to get Iraqi leaders to “set aside sectarian agendas,” reviewed options for “increased security assistance” and sought their views, the White House said.
A senior administration official said afterward that Obama did not lay out a course of action at the meeting and had yet to make a final decision.
But a U.S. national security source said the administration had quietly started consulting Congress about a plan for redirecting some current intelligence funding to help finance expanded U.S. operations in Iraq. Obama is facing pressure from U.S. lawmakers to persuade Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to step down over what they see as failed leadership in the face of the insurgency threatening his country.
REFINERY BATTLE
Sunni fighters were in control of three-quarters of the territory of the Baiji refinery north of Baghdad, an official said there, after a morning of heavy fighting at gates defended by elite troops who have been under siege for a week.
ISIL aims to build a Sunni caliphate ruled on mediaeval precepts, but the rebels also include a broad spectrum of more moderate Sunnis furious at what they see as oppression by Baghdad.
Some international oil companies have pulled out foreign workers. The head of Iraq’s southern oil company, Dhiya Jaffar, said Exxon Mobil had conducted a major evacuation and BP
had pulled out 20 percent of its staff. He criticised the moves, as the areas where oil is produced for export are mainly in the Shi’ite south and far from the fighting.
Washington and other Western capitals are trying to save Iraq as a united country by leaning hard on Maliki to reach out to Sunnis, the minority who ran Iraq until U.S. troops deposed dictator Saddam Hussein after the 2003 invasion.
Maliki met Sunni and Kurdish political opponents overnight, concluding with a frosty, carefully staged joint appearance at which an appeal for national unity was read out. In a televised address on Wednesday, Maliki appealed to tribes to renounce “those who are killers and criminals who represent foreign agendas”.
But Maliki’s government has so far relied almost entirely on his fellow Shi’ites for support, with officials denouncing Sunni political leaders as traitors. Shi’ite militia – many believed to be funded and backed by Iran – have mobilised to halt the Sunni advance, as Baghdad’s million-strong army, built by the United States at a cost of $25 billion, crumbles. Maliki announced on Wednesday that 59 officers would be brought to court for fleeing their posts last week as the insurgents seized Mosul, northern Iraq’s biggest city.
HOLY SHRINES
Like the civil war in Syria next door, the new fighting threatens to draw in regional neighbours, mustering along sectarian lines in what fighters on both sides depict as an existential struggle for survival based on a religious rift dating to the 7th century.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani made the clearest declaration yet that the Middle East’s main Shi’ite power, which fought a war against Iraq that killed a million people in the 1980s, was prepared to intervene to protect Iraq’s great shrines of Shi’ite imams, visited by millions of pilgrims each year.
“Regarding the holy Shi’a shrines in Karbala, Najaf, Kadhimiya and Samarra, we announce to the killers and terrorists that the great Iranian nation will not hesitate to protect holy shrines,” Rouhani said in an address to a crowd on live TV.
He said many people had signed up to go to Iraq to fight, although he also said Iraqis of all sects were prepared to defend themselves: “Thanks be to God, I will tell the dear people of Iran that veterans and various forces – Sunnis, Shias and Kurds all over Iraq – are ready for sacrifice.”
Iraqi troops are holding off Sunni fighters outside Samarra north of Baghdad, site of one of the main Shi’ite shrines. The fighters have vowed to carry their offensive south to Najaf and Kerbala, seats of Shi’ite Islam since the Middle Ages.