Iraq crisis: Maliki’s days in power numbered as Iran and US lose faith

June 21, 2014

Isolated and discredited by humiliating military defeat, the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is likely to go soon, battered as he is by only slightly veiled demands for his immediate departure from powerful figures who once supported him. Within hours of President Obama making it implicitly clear that he wants a change of political leadership in Baghdad, the spiritual leader of the Iraqi Shia, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, was calling for a new and “effective” government that avoided the mistakes of the old. Nobody in Baghdad has any doubts that he wants the Prime Minister gone.

The longer Mr Maliki clings on to power the more likely it is that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) will win further victories and the Sunni community will remain united behind the al-Qa’ida-type group. Military sources in Baghdad say Mr Obama’s clear signal that the US was not going to use its air force to preserve the status quo in Baghdad has “damaged the army’s morale and self-confidence”. The army had been hoping somewhat unrealistically for a promise of air strikes to stem the advance of Isis and its allies.

There are other less diplomatic voices demanding that Mr Maliki, who has held office since 2006, should go. Umm Nahid, a resident of Ramadi, the capital of the vast and overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar province, told The Independent that the city had been mostly taken by the Anbar Tribes Revolutionary Council, led by Hatem Suleiman. Suleiman says he is preventing Isis advancing down the road towards Baghdad, but will stop doing this unless the Iraqi army fully withdraws from Ramadi, all prisoners are released (some 100,000 are believed to be in jail) and, above all, “Maliki is removed from power”.

His threat strikingly underlines the extent to which Mr Maliki has become a hate figure for the five or six million-strong Iraqi Sunni community. Hostility to the Prime Minister as responsible for their oppression has enabled Isis fanatics to collaborate with disparate Sunni armed groups whom they were previously fighting. For the Sunni, hatred and fear of Mr Maliki is a powerful uniting force just as detestation of Saddam Hussein used to enable the Shia and Kurds to plaster over their differences.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-crisis-malikis-days-in-power-numberedas-iran-and-us-lose-faith-9552936.html