admin
BAGHDAD. — Fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have vowed to march on to Baghdad as Iraq’s parliament failed to agree over enforcing a nationwide state of emergency.
“We will march toward Baghdad because we have an account to settle there,” said the armed group’s spokesman yesterday in an audio recording posted on websites commonly used by the group.
The statement could not be independently verified. In a sign of ISIL’s confidence, he even boasted that its fighters will take the southern Shia cities of Karbala and Najaf, which hold two of the holiest shrines for Shia Muslims. A day earlier, ISIL fighters had seized Tikrit, 140km north-west of Baghdad, as Iraqi soldiers and security forces abandoned their posts. Dozens of members of a police special forces battalion were captured and paraded before a crowd in the city.
On Tuesday, the group captured much of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. ISIL and its allies among local tribesmen also hold the city of Fallujah and other pockets of the Sunni-dominated Anbar province to the west of Baghdad.
Yesterday, Iraqi Kurds took control of the disputed Iraqi oil hub of Kirkuk to protect it from ISIL, officials said.
“We tightened our control of Kirkuk city and are awaiting orders to move toward the areas that are controlled by ISIL,” Brigadier General Shirko Rauf of the Kurdish peshmerga security forces told the AFP news agency. Meanwhile, Iraq’s parliament failed to reach a quorum yesterday for a vote on declaring a nationwide state of emergency. Most of those boycotting parliament were from the country’s Sunni and Kurdish factions, who oppose giving extraordinary powers to Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
“It was a political move. Those parliamentarians that didn’t turn up made sure that this state of emergency wasn’t declared,” said Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, reporting from Baghdad.
“It was hugely criticised by Sunni politicians, saying the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has enough powers to be able to deal with this if only he reached out to the Sunnis and to the Kurds and to the other minorities in Iraq.” Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran, said the predominantly Shia Muslim country would act to combat the “violence and terrorism” of ISIL in the neighbouring country.
The Commander of Iran’s basij (volunteer) Force Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi condemned the crimes committed by Takfiri and Salafi groups in different regional states, specially in Syria and Iraq, and said these groups which are supported by the US have scratched the beautiful face of Islam.
Addressing a gathering in the Southeastern province of Sistan and Balochestan yesterday, Naqdi said that the US is manipulating the Takfiri terrorists to tarnish the image of Islam and the Muslims.
“Takfiri groups are used as a tool by enemies of Islam and they seem to lack a true understanding of Islam,” Chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi said in a meeting with Syrian Grand Mufti Sheikh Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun in Tehran in January. — Al Jazeera/FNA.
Online Reporter