State Department Spokeswoman Heather Nauert gave an update Tuesday on the difficult situation in which American diplomats find themselves in Iraq as two of their putative allies settle into an armed face-off that threatens to escalate into yet another chapter in the country’s 14-year civil war.
“As we watch the situation unfold in Iraq, we continue to call for calm, to call for calm on the part of the Kurds, on the part of the government in Baghdad as well. We have made no bones about that,” Nauert told reporters asking about the developing military situation around the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
Home to a diverse ethnic mix of Kurds, Turkmen, and Arabs, Kirkuk is the staging point for much of Iraq’s vital oil industry. The autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) held a successful independence referendum last month, much to the chagrin of Iraq’s largely Shiite Arab national government. Although the Kurds have yet to formally declare independence, the very possibility the region might take Kirkuk with it prompted the Baghdad regime to issue an ultimatum demanding the Kurdish Peshmerga forces evacuate the city.
Kurdish Peshmerga forces withdrew from Kirkuk as Iraqi soldiers, aided by the mostly-Shiite Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) militias, approached the city, which the Kurds had held since driving out the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014. Allegedly, the effort was led, in part, by Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ shadowy Quds Force special operations group, which is linked to Iranian meddling and terrorism throughout the Middle East. READ MORE
