BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraqi forces and Sunni militants battled
fiercely for control of the nation’s largest oil refinery on Wednesday
as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki went on a diplomatic offensive,
reaching out in a televised address to try to regain support from the
nation’s disaffected Sunnis and Kurds.
Meanwhile, the government asserted that it had retaken partial control of a strategic city near the
border with Syria.
Al-Maliki’s
conciliatory words, coupled with a vow to teach the militants a
"lesson," came as almost all Iraq’s main communities have been drawn
into a spasm of violence not seen since the dark days of sectarian
killings nearly a decade ago.
The U.S. has been pressing al-Maliki
to adopt political inclusion and undermine the insurgency by making
overtures to Iraq’s once-dominant Sunni minority, which has long
complained of discrimination by his government and abuses by his
Shiite-led security forces.
In Washington, President Barack Obama
briefed leaders of Congress on options for quelling the
al-Qaida-inspired insurgency, though White House officials said the
president had made no decisions about how to respond to the crumbling
security situation in Iraq. While Obama has not fully ruled out the
possibility of launching airstrikes, such action is not imminent,
officials said, in part because intelligence agencies have been unable
to identify clear targets on the ground.
Al-Maliki, a Shiite, has
rejected charges of bias against Iraq’s Sunnis and Kurds and has in
recent days been stressing that the threat posed by the militant Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, will affect all Iraqis
regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliations. He also rejects
any suggestion that the Islamic State and other extremist groups enjoy
support by disaffected Sunnis fed up with his perceived discrimination.
In
a move apparently designed to satisfy Obama’s demand for national
reconciliation, al-Maliki expressed optimism in a televised address
Wednesday over what he called the rise by all of Iraq’s political groups
to the challenge of defending the nation against the militant threat.
The crisis has led Iraqis to rediscover "national unity," he said.
"I
tell all the brothers there have been negative practices by members of
the military, civilians and militiamen, but that is not what we should
be discussing," al-Maliki said. "Our effort should not be focused here
and leave the larger objective of defeating ISIL."
Late Tuesday,
the prime minister appeared on television with Sunni and Kurdish
leaders. They issued a joint statement about the need to close ranks and
stick to "national priorities" in the face of the threat posed by the
militants.
Still, al-Maliki’s outreach remain largely rhetoric,
with no concrete action to bridge differences with Sunnis and Kurds, who
have been at loggerheads with the prime minister over their right to
independently export oil and over territorial claims.
Al-Maliki’s
upbeat assessment came as the military said government forces had
repelled repeated attacks by the militants on the country’s largest oil
refinery and retaken parts of the strategic city of Tal Afar, near the
Syrian border.
The chief military spokesman, Lt. Gen. Qassim
al-Moussawi, said Iraqi army troops had defended the refinery at Beiji,
some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Baghdad, and 40 attackers were
killed in fighting there overnight and early Wednesday.
An
employee at the oil refinery reached by The Associated Press late
Wednesday also said the facility remained in government hands, though
one of its fuel tanks was on fire after it was apparently hit by a
mortar shell fired by the militants. He spoke on condition of anonymity
in exchange for discussing the situation there.
The Beiji refinery
accounts for a little more than a quarter of the country’s entire
refining capacity — all of which goes toward domestic consumption for
things like gasoline, cooking oil and fuel for power stations. Any
lengthy outage at Beiji risks long lines at the gas pump and electricity
shortages, adding to the chaos already facing Iraq.
Video footage
posted online showed smoke billowing in the background from an area
near the refinery. Another clip uploaded by the Islamic State militants
showed heavily armed fighters arriving in the town, waving black flags
out of cars. The videos appear genuine and correspond to AP’s reporting
of the events depicted.
There was no independent confirmation of
the military’s claims about the Beiji refinery or that its forces had
retaken neighborhoods in Tal Afar, which Sunni fighters captured Monday.
Both are in territories held by insurgents that journalists have not
been able to access. Tal Afar’s proximity to the Syrian border
strengthens the Islamic State’s plan to carve out an Islamic caliphate,
or state, stretching across parts of the two countries.
The Iraqi crisis’ growing sectarian nature — which al-Maliki vehemently denies — caught the attention of
U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon.
In
a message to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Council meeting
Wednesday in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, he called on Iraq’s leaders "to come
together and agree on a national security plan to address the terrorist
threat from ISIL."
"The rapidly deteriorating security situation
in Iraq is deeply alarming and increases the sectarian tensions in the
region," Ban said. "It is imperative that acts of reprisal be avoided as
they can only intensify the cycle of violence."
The campaign by
the al-Qaida-inspired Islamic State militants has raised the specter of
the sectarian warfare that nearly tore the country apart in 2006 and
2007, with the popular mobilization to fight the insurgents taking an
increasingly sectarian slant, particularly after Iraq’s top Shiite
cleric made a call to arms on Friday.
The visit to Iraq this week
by Gen. Ghasem Soleimani, leader of Iran’s secretive Quds Force and its
most powerful general , has confirmed longtime suspicions by the Sunnis
that al-Maliki was too close to Iran, a mostly Shiite none-Arab nation
that Sunni Arab states, including powerhouse Saudi Arabia, see as a
threat to regional stability.
The Islamic State has vowed to march
to Baghdad and the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, home to
some of the sect’s most revered shrines, in the worst threat to Iraq’s
stability since U.S. troops left in late 2011. The militants also have
tried to capture Samarra, a city north of Baghdad and home to another
major Shiite shrine.
Iran has seen thousands volunteer to defend
the shrines and its president, Hassan Rouhani, told a crowd at a stadium
near the Iraq border: "We declare … that the great Iranian nation
will not miss any effort in protecting these sacred sites."
Al-Maliki
insists that the call to arms by the Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani was for all Iraqis and claimed, without producing evidence,
that those who responded included Sunnis.
That did not stop a new
cycle of sectarian violence, with the spark coming this week from the
Islamic State’s posting on the Internet of pictures purporting to show
its fighters killing scores of captured Shiite soldiers.
That was
followed by the slaughter by Shiite militiamen of nearly four dozen
Sunni detainees in the city of Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad, late
Monday, as well as the discovery Tuesday of the bullet-riddled bodies of
four young Sunnis in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad and a bomb attack
that killed 12 in an outdoor market in the capital’s Shiite Sadr City
district.
On Wednesday, a bomb blast killed four and wounded 11 in the mostly Sunni district of Ghazaliyah in
western Baghdad.
Meanwhile,
the government in India said 40 construction workers have been seized
near Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, which Sunni fighters captured
last week.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry said its diplomats were
also investigating a Turkish media report that militants grabbed 60
foreign construction workers, including some 15 Turks, near the northern
Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk.
Ethnic Kurds now control Kirkuk, moving
to fill a vacuum after the flight of Iraqi soldiers. They too are
battling the Sunni extremist militants.
Iraqi Foreign Minister
Hoshyar Zebari said Wednesday that his country had formally asked the
U.S. to launch airstrikes against positions of the Islamic State.
Gen.
Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff,
confirmed the U.S. had received a request for air power to stop the
militants, but highlighted the uncertain political situation in Iraq.
"The
entire enterprise is at risk as long as this political situation is in
flux," told a Senate panel Wednesday. He added that some Iraqi security
forces had backed down when confronted by the militants because they had
"simply lost faith" in the central government in Baghdad.
U.S.
officials say Obama has shifted his focus away from airstrikes as an
immediate option, in part because there are few clear targets the U.S.
could hit, though that could change if intelligence agencies can
identify clear targets on the ground.
Republicans continued to
insist Wednesday that Obama bore the blame for allowing the insurgency
to strengthen because of his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq
in late 2011 after more than eight years of war. Washington and Baghdad
failed to reach a security agreement that would have allowed American
forces to stay longer.
"What’s happening in Iraq is a direct
result of the president’s misguided decisions," said Rep. Duncan Hunter,
R-Calif., a Marine reservist who served two combat tours in Iraq.
"Militarily, the U.S. won in Iraq, but the hard-fought and hard-earned
gains of our servicemen and women have been politically squandered by
the president and his administration."
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Associated Press
writers Sameer N. Yacoub and Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad, AKaty Daigle
in New Delhi, Julie Pace and Bradley Klapper in Washington, and Suzan
Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.