Kerry pushes for new Iraq government
BAGHDAD – As insurgents grabbed another key town from Iraqi forces, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made an unannounced visit to Baghdad on Monday to push for the speedy formation of a new government that could pull the country back from the brink of sectarian war.
Kerry met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and senior Shiite Muslim, Sunni Muslim and Kurdish leaders during the highest-level visit by a U.S. official since Iraq’s crisis began.
Although Kerry did not call on the divisive al-Maliki, a Shiite, to step down, he urged leaders not to delay in forming a new government that shares more power with minority Sunnis and Kurds and bridges the sectarian divides that have fueled the insurgency.
“It is a moment of decision for Iraq’s leaders,” Kerry said at a news conference. “Iraq faces an existential threat, and Iraq’s leaders have to meet that threat.”
As Kerry held talks, Iraqi security officials said that government forces ceded control of the northern city of Tal Afar to insurgents led by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. It was the latest key town to slip from government hands.
Iraqi military spokesman Qassim Atta said that “terrorists” had surrounded the city of 200,000 people and that army troops made a strategic retreat.
“There are many choices for security forces to attack,” Atta said. “The withdrawal from Tal Afar is to plan for those attacks, not because of defeat.”
A decade ago, U.S. forces launched a major offensive to retake Tal Afar from the militant group al-Qaida in Iraq, sending 1,200 troops to conduct a house-by-house clearing operation that eventually flushed out the militants. Now in the hands of ISIS, an al-Qaida splinter group, the town and its airport are considered critical because of their location along a strategic corridor to neighboring Syria.
Sunni militants led by ISIS drove government forces out of a series of border crossings over the weekend, expanding their control over a wide swath of territory that extends from Syria across northern Iraq to within an hour’s drive of the capital, Baghdad.
On Monday, Iraqi officials said they had sent troops to the western town of Haditha, in Anbar province, to support local Sunni tribes against the insurgents. Haditha is seen as key because it is the site of Iraq’s biggest dam, which controls the flow of water to the Euphrates Valley, the country’s breadbasket.
Anbar, a vast and predominantly Sunni province along the Syrian border, is almost completely in the hands of insurgents, who have also seized border crossings between Iraq and Syria.