John Kerry Urges Kurds to Stick with Baghdad Against ISIS




 Written by : Mohamed Abdel Fattah
Jun 24, 2014

 Secretary of State John Kerry  arrived in Iraq's northeastern city of Erbil early Tuesday where met with local leaders to discuss how to deal with Islamist militants sweeping western Iraq .

The top U.S. diplomat arrived in Erbil, the capital of Iraq's northern, autonomous Kurdish region trying to convince Kurdish to back the Iraqi government in its fight against a growing Islamist insurgency in Iraq and to support the formation of a new national government in Baghdad.

"This is a very critical time for Iraq, and the government formation challenge is the central challenge that we face," Kerry said. He said Iraqi leaders must "produce the broad-based, inclusive government that all the Iraqis I have talked to are demanding."

Kerry's visit to Kurdistan came amid a new round of conflicting reports that Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants had captured Iraq's largest oil refinery at Beiji, north of Tikrit.

Kerry of an hour-long private meeting with the Kurdish security forces known as peshmerga , he has asked him in helping restrain the advance of (ISIL). The Peshmerga, have engaged in the fight against ISIS along the Kurdish region's borders in northern Iraq and took control over the long-contested city of Kirkuk.

US officials believe that persuading the Kurds to stick with the government in Baghdad will help keep Iraq together. "If they decide to withdraw from the Baghdad political process, it will accelerate a lot of the negative trends," said a senior state department official.

The top American diplomat visited Baghdad on Monday and pressed Iraqi politicians to quickly form a new national government that does more to unify the country's three communities: Shiite, Sunni and Kurd.

American officials have privately signaled the U.S. no longer believes Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, should serve a third term as his policies have alienated the country's Sunni and Kurdish leaders.

Kerry said after the Baghdad meetings that all the leaders agreed to start the process of forming a new government by 1 July, which will advance a constitutionally required timetable for distributing power

After his stop in Iraq, Kerry is due to travel to Brussels for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers, and State Department officials say they expect to have discussions there with European partners about the situation in Iraq.

Sources

Guardian

cbsnews.

online.wsj.com

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