A police officer was also killed by snipers in Turkey’s restive Kurdish-dominated southeast on Wednesday, local security sources said.
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“Our existence in Iraq is to ensure the stability of the region because we do not want to be neighbors with Daesh [the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group]”, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency quoted Davutoglu as saying.
Earlier, the Turkish military said it has carried out aerial raids on suspected Kurdish rebel sites in a new cross-border offensive in northern Iraq.
“We believe that Turkey has acted recklessly and inexplicably, carrying out additional deployments on the territory of Iraq without the consent of the Iraqi government”. As Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has struggled to please both sides, he is increasingly seen as weak and indecisive, further undermining efforts to defeat the extremists. He said he came to this conclusion as he visited Washington in a delegation of the UN Security Council members’ ambassadors.
Barzani has long-standing ties with Ankara, and there are multiple Turkish military sites in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, of which he is the president. The Turkish leader also blamed the policies of Iraq and Iran for the rise of sectarianism in the war in neighbouring Syria.
“If Turkey does not withdraw its troops and the Security Council, the Arab League and the worldwide community will continue to idle, we will find a way to protect our legal rights”, Iraqi parliament member from the State of Law bloc, Awatif Nima, told RT.
Turkey has stationed troops near Mosul since 2014 as part of a training mission coordinated with the Baghdad government. In Iraq, the U.S.-backed government’s struggles against Islamic State leave the second-largest oil producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries vulnerable to break up along ethnic and sectarian lines.
Dr. Saban Kardas, president of Ankara-based ORSAM (the Middle East Strategic Research Center), told Al Arabiya News: “I don’t expect that Turkey would manipulate this particular military presence in order to take a new position against regional powers”.
Badr Brigade spokesman Karim al-Nuri likened the Turkish incursion with the occupation of Iraq by Islamic State militants and said “all options” were available.
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“We are ready for talks and every kind of exchange of ideas with Russian Federation but will never allow anything to be dictated to us”, he said.
