As reported, on Monday Turkey said that hundreds of soldiers, who arrived last week at a base in northern Iraq, would not be withdrawn by it, despite being ordered by Baghdad to send them out within 48 hours.
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Baghdad says Ankara deployed the troops without its permission and has appealed to the United Nations Security Council to call for their immediate withdrawal.
Turkish troops who have been stationed at the Bashiqa camp near Iraq’s Mosul since 2014 in order to train Iraqi forces and Kurdish Peshmerga forces against the ISIL threat would be reorganized in accordance with the Iraqi government’s sensitivities, the sources said on December 11. Turkey subsequently halted new deployments but has refused to withdraw its soldiers.
Elsewhere in the city of Nasiriyah, about 320 kilometers (200 miles) southeast of Baghdad, demonstrators gathered near Habboubi Square, calling on Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and Defense Minister Khaled al-Obaidi to take “a firm stance” against Turkey’s act of “aggression”.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has spoken by phone with his Iraqi counterpart Ibrahim al-Jaafari to discuss the “unlawful incursion” of Turkish troops in northern Iraq, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.
Earlier, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, urged the government to show “no tolerance” for any infringement of the country’s sovereignty.
They added that Turkish and Iraqi officials have agreed to begin new efforts to launch a mechanism for deeper security cooperation.
We of course have suggested that one explanation for Turkeys deployment is that Erdogan is keen on having an expanded military presence in northern Iraq now that some rather inconvenient questions are being asked about his familys role in facilitating the flow of illicit ISIS crude from oil fields in Iraq and Syria to Ceyhan.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that a complaint lodged by Iraq’s government to the U.N. Security Council about the presence of Turkish forces in the country was not an honest step.
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A number of Iraqi military and political figures – including former prime minister and current lawmaker, Nouri al-Maliki, and the commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilizations Forces, Hadi al-Ameri – were present in the rally.
