Shi’ite cleric urges deal on next Iraqi PM
The appeal by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani comes as al-Maliki is fighting to keep his job, with even key patron Iran exploring alternatives in the face of Iraq’s worst crisis since US troops withdrew at the end of 2011.
The conflict has drawn the Americans back to Iraq with special forces being deployed to help Iraqi troops. The US also has started flying armed drones over Baghdad to protect US interests in the Iraqi capital, a Pentagon official said.
Al-Maliki — who has governed the country since 2006 — needs support from other parties after his State of Law bloc won the most seats in the elections but failed to gain the majority needed to govern alone. That set the stage for potentially months of coalition negotiations.
But now a new government is wanted urgently to face the lightning advance across the north and west by the al-Qaeda breakaway Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
The stunning gains were made possible in large part because Iraqi security forces melted away in the face of the onslaught.
Human Rights Watch released a report yesterday about the killings of scores of police and soldiers by the Sunni militants in the days after it captured the northern city of Mosul on June 10 and then stormed south to capture Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.
The killings were widely reported after the Islamic State posted graphic, online photos showing dozens of men wearing civilian clothes lined up and bent over as militants pointed rifles at them from behind. A final set of photos shows bodies.
Human Rights Watch said that based on analysis of the photos and satellite imagery, the militants killed between 160 to 190 men in two locations in Tikrit between June 11 and June 14.
“The number of victims may well be much higher, but the difficulty of locating bodies and accessing the area has prevented a full investigation,” the group said.
It said it used satellite imagery from 2013 and publicly available photos taken earlier to pinpoint the site of the killings in a field next to the Tigris River and near one of Saddam’s former palaces.
It said satellite imagery of the site from June 16 did not reveal bodies but showed indications of earth movement consistent with the two shallow trenches visible in the photos, in which the soldiers were forced to lie down before being shot.
Chief Iraqi military spokesman Lieutenant General Qassim al-Moussawi confirmed the online photographs’ authenticity on June 15 after they first surfaced.
Captions on the photos showing the soldiers after they were shot say “hundreds have been liquidated,” but the total could not be verified.
The massacre appeared to be aimed at instilling fear in Iraq’s demoralised armed forces as well as the country’s Shi’ite majority, whom the Islamic State views as apostates.
But evidence points to atrocities committed by both sides in the conflict, rights groups said.
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