Watch above: In the midst of the chaos in Iraq, as ISIS continues to gain control of territory, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region to ask for help to keep the country together. Stuart Greer reports.
IRBIL, Iraq – Iraq‘s top Kurdish leader warned visiting Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday that a rapid Sunni insurgent advance has already created “a new reality and a new Iraq,” signalling that the U.S. faces major difficulties in its efforts to promote unity among the country’s divided factions.
The U.N., meanwhile, said more than 1,000 people, most civilians, have been killed in Iraq so far this month, the highest death toll since the U.S. military withdrew from the country in December 2011.
Massoud Barzani, whose powerful minority bloc has long functioned as kingmaker in Iraqi politics, did not directly mention Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is facing the strongest challenge to his rule since he assumed power in 2006. But al-Maliki has made little effort beyond rhetoric to win the trust of his critics, who are led by disaffected Sunnis, Kurds and even several former Shiite allies.
READ MORE: Kerry confronts threat of new war in Iraq
Instead the Kurds have deployed their own well-trained security forces known as peshmerga and seized long-coveted ground of their own in the name of defending it from the al-Qaida breakaway group and other Sunni insurgents who have swept through the north. The Kurds are unlikely to be eager to give up that territory, including the disputed oil-rich city of Kirkuk, regardless of the status of the fighting.
Al-Maliki, meanwhile, has been entirely focused on the security situation, spending hours each day in the main military command centre, rather than politics, officials close to his inner circle say, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to release such details. Despite the attention, Iraq’s mainly Shiite security forces have failed to successfully wage any successful counteroffensives against the insurgents.
Kerry travelled to Irbil, the capital of the self-rule Kurdish region on Tuesday, a day after meeting with al-Maliki and other Iraqi officials in Baghdad where he pushed for them to adopt new policies that would give more authority to Iraq’s minority Sunnis and Kurds.
Kerry said after the Baghdad meetings that all the leaders agreed to start the process of seating a new parliament by July 1, which will advance a constitutionally required timetable for naming a president, prime minister and a new Cabinet. Al-Maliki’s political bloc won the most seats in parliamentary elections in April but must assemble a majority coalition in the legislature in order to secure a third term for the Shiite leader.
Once a stable government is in place, officials hope Iraqi security forces will be inspired to fight the insurgency instead of fleeing, as they did in several major cities and towns in Sunni-dominated areas since the start of the year.
Kerry has repeatedly said that it’s up to Iraqis – not the U.S. or other nations – to select their leaders. But he also has noted bitterness and growing impatience among all of Iraq’s major sects and ethnic groups with al-Maliki’s government.
Barzani’s support will be crucial for resolving the political impasse because Kurds represent about 20 per cent of Iraq’s population and usually vote as a unified bloc.
Barzani told Kerry that Kurds are seeking “a solution for the crisis that we have witnessed.” But, he said, “we are facing a new reality and a new Iraq.”
WATCH: Kurdish president tells John Kerry Iraq is facing “a new reality”
Barzani did not explain what he meant by a “new Iraq,” but he was apparently referring to the fall under Kurdish control of Kirkuk and other areas in northern Iraq that Kurds have long sought to incorporate into their self-rule region. Other Kurdish officials have even raised the possibility of pressing for independence, although that is opposed by the U.S. and neighbouring Turkey.
READ MORE: Iraq crisis: What does the future hold for Kurdistan?
Kerry said at the start of an hour-long private meeting that the Kurdish security forces have been “really critical” in helping restrain the insurgents’ gains, although they have managed to seize several cities in the north and the west.
“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.”
The U.S. believes a new power-sharing agreement in Baghdad would soothe anger directed at the majority Shiite government, something that is thought to have fueled the ongoing insurgency. Iraq’s population is about 60 per cent Shiite Muslim, whose leaders rose to power with U.S. help after the 2003 fall of former President Saddam Hussein and his Sunni-dominated regime.
“A united Iraq is a stronger Iraq,” Kerry said in an interview broadcast on NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday. He told ABC, “This is an opportunity for Iraq to come up with its own choice.” Kerry also said that neither President Barack Obama nor the American people want a wholesale U.S. intervention in Iraq. And on CBS, he said the U.S. “is trying to move this process forward in what I think is a thoughtful, focused, disciplined way so that we have a structure in Iraq which will give us the greatest capacity for success.”
Minority Sunnis who enjoyed far more authority and privilege under Saddam than any other sect have long been bitter about the Shiite-led government. And al-Maliki has been personally accused of targeting Sunni leaders whom he considers his political opponents.
Iraqi Kurds had no love for Saddam, and were allowed to carve out a semi-autonomous region in Iraq’s north to protect themselves from his policies. But Barzani for years has feuded with al-Maliki, most recently over the Kurdish regional government’s decision to export oil through Turkey without giving Baghdad its required share of the revenues.
The Kurdish region is home to several vast oil fields, which have reaped security and economic stability unmatched across the rest of the Iraq.
WATCH: Hundreds of volunteers gathered at a Baghdad military recruitment centre on Tuesday, signing up to join the fight against Islamic militants in Iraq
Control of Kirkuk and Kurdish pockets in the province of Diyala and elsewhere in northern Iraq have been at the heart of tension between the Kurdish region and the Baghdad government. Al-Maliki’s supporters frequently suggest that the Kurds stood by as the Sunni militants swept through most areas in the north because they stood to gain the most from chaos in the region. The Kurds respond by saying they only moved to Kirkuk and other areas to fill the security vacuum left behind by Baghdad’s government forces.
Al-Maliki has for months requested U.S. military help to quell the insurgency, and the Obama administration has said it must respond to the insurgent threat before it spreads beyond Iraq’s borders and puts the West at risk of attack.
President Barack Obama is reluctant to send American military might back to the war zone it left in 2011 after more than eight years of fighting, although U.S. special forces have been ordered to Baghdad to train and advise Iraqi counterterror soldiers.
The U.N. findings were the first concrete sign of the toll the chaos is taking on civilians and Iraqi security forces.
Its team reported at least 1,075 people killed, including 757 civilians in the Ninevah, Diyala and Salahuddin provinces in northern and central Iraq, and another 599 civilians were wounded from June 5 through Sunday.
U.N. human rights office spokesman Rupert Colville cautioned however that the figure “should be viewed very much as a minimum,” and said it included “summary executions” and extra-judicial killings of civilians, police and soldiers who had signalled that they were no longer combatants.
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