WASHINGTON — Terrorists “found a second chance” to thrive in Iraq, the nation’s prime minister said Thursday in asking for new U.S. aid to beat back a bloody insurgency that has been fueled by the neighboring Syrian civil war and the departure of American troops from Iraq two years ago.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told a packed auditorium at the U.S. Institute of Peace that he needs additional weapons, help with intelligence and other assistance, and claimed the world has a responsibility to help.
“If the situation in Iraq is not well-treated, it will be disastrous for the whole world,” said al-Maliki, whose comments were translated from Arabic. “Terrorism does not know a single religion, or confession, or a single border. They carry their rotten ideas everywhere. They carry bad ideas instead of flowers. Al-Qaeda is a dirty wind that wants to spread worldwide.”
The new request comes nearly two years after al-Maliki’s government refused to let U.S. forces remain in Iraq with legal immunity that the Obama administration insisted was necessary to protect troops. President Barack Obama had campaigned on ending the nearly nine-year war in Iraq and took the opportunity offered by the legal dispute to pull all troops out.
Al-Maliki will meet Friday with Obama in what Baghdad hopes will be a fresh start in a complicated relationship that has been marked both by victories and frustrations for each side.
Within months of the U.S. troops’ departure, violence began creeping up in the capital and across the country as Sunni Muslim insurgents lashed out, angered by a belief that Sunnis have been sidelined by the Shiite-led government. The State Department says at least 6,000 Iraqis have been killed in attacks so far this year, and suicide bombers launched 38 strikes in the last month alone.
“So the terrorists found a second chance,” al-Maliki said — a turnabout from an insurgency that was mostly silenced by the time the U.S. troops left.
Al-Maliki said he will ask Obama for new assistance to bolster Iraq’s military and fight al-Qaeda. That could include speeding up the delivery of U.S. aircraft, missiles, interceptors and other weapons, and improving national intelligence systems. Separately, Iraq’s ambassador to the U.S. also did not rule out the possibility of asking the U.S. to send military special forces or additional CIA advisers to Iraq to help train and assist counterterror troops.
Shortly after al-Maliki’s speech, White House spokesman Jay Carney called continued U.S. aid to Iraq “necessary” and said “denying that assistance would be contrary to our interests.”
