Iraqi MPs Warn US to Drop Plan for Meddling in Kurdistan Region

Iraq’s parliamentarians voiced their strong opposition to the US mediation between the Baghdad government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), and warned Washington to stay away from Iraq’s problems.

“The Americans cannot solve Iraq’s problems, because during their nine-year presence in Iraq they showed that they cannot do anything or solve any problem in such a way that they have left behind thousands of problems for Iraq,” an Iraqi parliamentarian and one of the leaders of the Iraqi Kurdistan’s Coalition Mahmoud Osman told FNA on Monday.

He urged Iraq’s political parties to start talks in a bid to resolve the country’s problems.

Osman also stressed that the Turkish government should be held responsible for the problems affecting Iraq’s Kurdish region.

“On one hand, Turkey provokes Kurdistan against Iraq’s central government and on the other, it instigates the central government (in Baghdad) against the Kurds,” he added.

Another Iraqi MP, Eskandar Vetvet, told FNA that “Iraq does not need the US interference in its internal affairs, specially with regard to the Erbil crisis”.

Javad al-Bozoni, another Iraqi lawmaker, said that the US meddling in Iraq’s affairs doest not benefit that country, specially considering that the so-called crisis in the relations between Baghdad and Erbil is fake and not a genuine crisis.

He said the US left Iraq according to the will of the Iraqi people and thus its return to Iraq would be unacceptable because it would run counter to the will of the nation.

Last month, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki rejected a proposal by US Vice-President Joe Biden for the deployment of the US forces in Iraq’s Northern province of Kirkuk.

Biden in a telephone conversation with Iraqi prime minister Saturday night asked for Maliki’s consent to the deployment of the US troops in Kirkuk, but the premier rejected the US vice-president’s offer, an informed source told FNA in Baghdad.

The source, who asked to remain unnamed due to the sensitivity of his information, said during the phone talk, Biden voiced concern about a recent clash between the Pishmerga forces of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, who are the local law enforcement troops of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), and Iraq’s Federal Police troops, and said the US troops should be deployed in the oil rich Kirkuk province in a bid to prevent the outbreak of a civil war.

“But the Iraqi Prime Minister strongly rejected Biden’s proposal,” the source added.

Earlier this year in June, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki cancelled a pending visit by the US vice-president to Baghdad, which was aimed at meetings with high-ranking Iraqi officials.

“Nuri al-Maliki did not allow US Vice-President Joe Biden to visit Iraq,” an informed source in the Iraqi prime minister’s information bureau told FNA in Baghdad in June.

Earlier reports by a website affiliated to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq said that the cancellation of Biden’s visit by Maliki was ordered after it had been revealed that the US vice-president was due to visit the Kurdish city of Erbil.