Iraq says it gave no authorization for the Turkish troops to cross the border.
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Hadi al-Amiri, the leader of the powerful Badr Brigade, a Shiite militia, called for the troops to leave, drawing cheers and chants. New deployments later prevented.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkish troops deployed in Iraq for training purposes in the fight against the Islamic State were not on combat mission and their pullout was “out of the question”.
Be Civil – It’s OK to have a difference in opinion but there’s no need to be a jerk. We don’t have that luxury.
The deployment of several hundred troops by Turkey in Bashiqa, close to an area held by IS in northern Iraq, has enraged Baghdad which has asked Ankara to withdraw all its forces. Baghdad said their presence was a “flagrant violation” of worldwide law.
The peshmerga in particular have been a consistent adversary against the Islamic State in Iraq.
On Thursday, an Iraqi foreign ministry spokesman said that Iraq has contacted the five permanent member states of the UN Security Council for condemning Turkey’s deployment of troops on Iraqi soil.
His representative, Ahmed al-Safi, relayed the words of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani during a Friday sermon in the city of Karbala.
He went on to say that Russian Federation and Iran were behind the Iraqi complaints.
In the Iraq’s south-eastern city of Nasiriyah demonstrators called on the country’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and the Defense Minister Khaled al-Obaidi to take a “firm stance” against Turkey’s “aggression”, Press TV reports.
The Iraqi defense minister had been scheduled to visit Turkey, but al-Jaafari preferred to host the Turkish minister over tensions between Ankara and Baghdad, Çavuşoğlu said on December 11 in a televised interview.
“Iraq worked on containment of this issue by diplomatic means and bilateral talks, but these efforts did not succeed in convincing Turkey to withdraw its occupying forces from Iraqi territory”, Alhakim wrote to Power, noting that the Turkish incursion was an “aggressive act”.
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Erdogan defended Turkey’s move to send more troops, saying IS and other terror groups were “running wild” in Iraq and that Baghdad was not able to protect the Turkish soldiers there.
