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Iraqi Leader Asks World Powers to Pursue ISIS in Syria Kerry Says U.S. Is Still Open to Talking to Iran About ISIS Threat
(about 3 hours later)
PARIS — President Fuad Masum of Iraq urged world powers on Monday to take the fight against the Sunni militants who have occupied much of his country to neighboring Syria. PARIS — Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday that the Obama administration would keep the door open to confidential communications with Iran on the security crisis in Iraq, despite sarcastic criticism from Iran’s supreme leader, who said the American plan for bombing Islamic militants, their common enemy, was absurd.
“We must not allow them to have sanctuaries,” Mr. Masum said at the opening of an international conference on helping Iraq respond to the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. “We must pursue them wherever they are.” Mr. Kerry acknowledged that the United States had opposed a role for Iran at the international conference here on strengthening a coalition to help the new government in Baghdad fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
The more than two dozen nations that participated in the conference later issued a statement pledging their support for the new Iraqi government in its fight against ISIS, including military assistance. Both King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and top officials from the United Arab Emirates had informed the United States that they would not attend the meeting here if Iran was present, said Mr. Kerry, who also stressed that the United States would not coordinate militarily with the Iranians.
But no fresh pledges of military aid were announced, and the statement did not commit any of the nations to take military action inside Syria. But Mr. Kerry also said that American officials were still prepared to talk to Iranian officials about Iraq and Syria, including on the margins of the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, which will resume in New York on Thursday.
“They committed to supporting the new Iraqi Government in its fight against’’ ISIS, including appropriate military assistance, the statement said. It added that the aid would be “in accordance with international law and without jeopardizing civilian security.” Just because Iranians were not invited to the Paris conference, Mr. Kerry said, “doesn’t mean that we are opposed to the idea of communicating to find out if they will come on board or under what circumstances or whether there is the possibility of a change.”
President François Hollande of France, who opened the session, said ISIS represented a global danger and urged the international community to help Iraq. Mr. Kerry said that “having a channel of communication on one of the biggest issues in the world today is common sense.”
“The Iraqis’ fight against terrorists is also ours,” Mr. Hollande said. “There is no time to lose.” Still, Mr. Kerry acknowledged that previous attempts made by Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns to draw the Iranians into a discussion of regional issues on the margins of earlier rounds of talks had not been productive.
Mr. Masum’s appeal for broader military action against ISIS is not a new one for the Iraqi government, but it was significant that he made it in a gathering of 26 nations plus representatives of the United Nations, the European Union and the Arab League. “The confidential discussions never got to that sort of substance,” Mr. Kerry said.
In recent weeks, the United States has focused its airstrikes inside Iraq: defending the northern city of Erbil, securing Mosul Dam and protecting Haditha Dam. In Tehran, the tone was quite different. Iranian officials gave out flurries of statements to local reporters on Monday, saying they had rejected multiple invitations by the United States to join the coalition. Never, they asserted, would Iran consider working with the United States to cleanse the region of terrorists, who the Iranians asserted had been created and nurtured by the West.
But Iraq’s new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, has asked the United States to take action on the Syrian side of the border to deprive ISIS of the havens it enjoys there. The country’s highest leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, indicated that no matter who had invited whom, Iran would sit arms crossed and watch as the coalition tries to bomb ISIS away.
And Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish autonomous region, also urged action in the Iraqi-Syria border area in a telephone call on Saturday with Secretary of State John Kerry, State Department officials said. On Monday, as Mr. Khamenei was discharged from the hospital after a prostate operation, he said that he had enjoyed his time as a patient, since he had “a hobby,” which was “listening to Americans making statements on combating ISIS — it was really amusing,” a statement posted on his personal website read. “Of course,” he said, such statements are “absurd, hollow and biased.”
“The Iraqis have asked for assistance in the border regions, and that’s something we’re looking at,” a senior State Department official said on Sunday. The official asked not to be identified under the protocol for briefing reporters. Mr. Khamenei, who has long argued that the United States and other Western countries have had a hand in the creation and swift expansion of ISIS, gave details on what he said were several instances of outreach by American officials, asking Iran to participate.
ISIS is in control of much of northern and western Iraq and has a sanctuary in Syria. Western nations are concerned that more Europeans or Americans might join the group, become further radicalized and then return home to carry out terrorist attacks. Although some Iranian officials wanted to consider the offer, Mr. Khamenei vetoed it. “I said we will not accompany America in this matter because they have got dirty intentions and hands,” he said. “How can it be possible to cooperate with the United States in such conditions?”
As the conference began, French officials confirmed that their planes, based in the United Arab Emirates, were carrying out reconnaissance flights over Iraq to identify ISIS targets. But France has stopped short of calling for military action against ISIS camps and command centers in Syria or carrying out reconnaissance missions in Syrian airspace. The real goal of the American-led coalition is to be able to bomb Iraq, and Iran’s main regional ally, Syria, with impunity, Mr. Khamenei said, revealing increasing worries of an American drone army hovering over the region. “They seek pretexts to interfere in Iraq and Syria, just as they did in Pakistan, where it can commit any crime it wants,” Mr. Khamenei said.
The Obama administration has authorized intelligence gathering over Syria and has said targets there are not off-limits for eventual airstrikes. But American officials have indicated that the first phase of their plan is to carry out air attacks in Iraq while helping to train or equip Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish pesh merga fighters and to stand up new national guard units whose members would largely be from Sunni tribes. Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, declined a request by Mr. Kerry, the ayatollah said. “Even the American deputy foreign minister, who is a woman and everyone knows her, had repeated this request in a meeting with Mr. Araghchi again,” Mr. Khamenei said, referring to Under Secretary Wendy Sherman and the Iranian deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. “But Mr. Araghchi also rejected her request.”
One country that opposes ISIS but is not attending the conference here is Iran. The French government had initially opened the door to a possible role by Iran, but American officials were concerned that this might have precluded Saudi Arabia and some Sunni states from attending. So Mr. Kerry opposed the idea, noting that Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force has been supporting President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Ideologically, any form of partnership with Iran’s old enemy is hard to stomach for Mr. Khamenei and his supporters. Analysts say Iran’s leaders simply cannot participate in an umbrella group in which the United States plays a decisive role.
“Under the circumstances, at this moment in time, it would not be right,” Mr. Kerry said on Friday during a visit to Ankara, Turkey, adding that he had not been consulted about the idea of including Iran. “Iran has been deeply involved with its forces on the ground in Syria.” Iran also fears that the coalition will ultimately further undermine its regional ally President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who has been receiving extensive financial and military support from the Iranians.
Iran, for its part, criticized the Paris conference and argued that representatives from the Assad government should be included in any coordinated international strategy against ISIS. “Are we stupid to join the Americans and their coalition?” asked Hossein Sheikholseslami, a parliamentary adviser who helps shape Iran’s Syria policies. “Except for the Iraqis, they are all the same people who over the past three years have been plotting against Syria in over 20 different conferences.”
“The best way of fighting” ISIS is to “strengthen the Iraqi and Syrian governments, which have been engaged in a serious struggle against terrorism,” Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian told a visiting French lawmaker in Tehran, according to the Iranian news agency ISNA. “The Islamic Republic of Iran has not been waiting for the formation of an international coalition — it has been carrying out its obligations.” In another challenge to the American-led plan to intercede again in Iraq after withdrawing nearly three years ago, a major Iraqi Shiite militia at the forefront of the battle against ISIS said Monday that it would leave the battlefield if American soldiers joined the fight.
Mr. Assad has sought to present himself as the only viable alternative to ISIS. Some critics say Mr. Assad may have refrained from attacking some ISIS targets in Syria, while taking the fight to moderate Syria rebels, so that he could present himself as a potential ally of the West in its struggle against Islamic extremism. “We will not fight alongside the American troops under any kind of conditions whatsoever,” the militia, Kata’b Hezbollah, said in a statement on its website. The only contact the militia foresees with the American military, the statement said, is “if we fight each other.”
The militia is supported by Iran but is unrelated to the Lebanese organization Hezbollah, except for having a shared patron and a similar ideology. Its threat illustrated the delicate line that the Obama administration proposes to walk in its efforts to defeat the Sunni extremists of ISIS without either enhancing or fighting the rival Shiite militias.
“America became the direct reason behind the suffering of the Iraqi people when it invaded Iraq,” Kata’b Hezbollah said in its statement. “The U.S. Army will not be allowed to return to Iraq.”