Comments attributed to the most senior US army official about the possibility of Iraq being partitioned are irresponsible and ignorant, the media office of the country’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Thursday. General Ray Odierno, who retires as US Army chief of staff on Friday, told reporters in Washington on Wednesday that partition “could happen” but was for the region, politicians and diplomats to figure out. “It might be the only solution, but I’m not ready to say that yet,” said Odierno, who has spent most of the last two decades dealing with conflict in Iraq. The seizure of swathes of Iraq’s north and west over the past year by Islamic State militants has fuelled speculation about the country splintering into Shi’ite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish regions. Abadi’s media office said it was surprised at the comments attributed to Odierno, which it considered “irresponsible and reflecting ignorance of the Iraqi situation”.Abadi introduced sweeping reforms this week aimed at ending a setup that shares out government posts on ethnic and sectarian lines. Addressing his last Pentagon news conference, Odierno also said the fight against Islamic State was at a stalemate and the US military should consider putting support troops on the ground with Iraqi forces if it saw no progress in coming months. With large chunks of Iraq’s western territory occupied by the self-styled ‘Islamic State’, and the US-built, post-Saddam Iraqi army unable to recover it, the writ of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government seems confined to the capital, and that too shakily as shown by Thursday’s atrocity. As always, it is civilians who have suffered most from the anarchy in Iraq, the fatalities for 2014 being over 17,000, which is almost double the figure for 2013 — over 9,000. With the monthly average for the current year being 1,500, it appears highly unlikely that the beleaguered Abadi government and its demoralised army will be able to reverse the trend.The issue is Iraq’s very survival and the grave consequences for the region if the country goes the way Gen Odierno suggests. The trauma Iraq is going through began with the America-led invasion of 2003. There was no justification for it, for the UN mission led by Hans Blix had reported to the Security Council it had found no “smoking gun” — a reference to weapons of mass destruction. The invasion was successful, the Baathist regime was overthrown and Saddam Hussein hanged. But peace in Iraq has remained out of reach, general elections notwithstanding. The anarchy has enabled the IS to make Iraq the base of its operation and push into Syria as far as the Turkish border. Gen Odierno’s warning must be taken seriously by regional powers, for Iraq’s disintegration could trigger a chain-effect which could destabilise the Middle East, especially Turkey and Iran, both of which have large Kurdish and other minorities. Now it is on the regional powers to act to save the Iraq otherwise it would easily fall to brutal forces.
pk.shafaqna.com
