U.S. Is ‘Main Obstacle’ To Progress, Iran Tells Iraq
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq concluded a three-day visit to Iran after meeting yesterday with Ayatollah Ali Khameni, who warned that the continued presence of American troops was “the main obstacle on the way to progress and prosperity in Iraq.”
The session with Mr. Khameni, Iran’s top religious and political authority, served to further highlight the delicate position of the Iraqi government — caught between America and Iran, enemies seeking to pull Iraq out of the other’s sphere of influence.
American officials have long accused Shiite Muslim-dominated Iran of playing a negative role in the affairs of its neighbor to the west, which has had a Shiite-run government since the 2003 American-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein. Some members of a Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, which recently fought American and Iraqi troops in Baghdad and Basra, openly have admitted to receiving Iranian weapons.
Mr. Khameni said Iraq’s “most important problem” isn’t the still-active Sunni insurgency or the reigning in of Shiite Muslim militias but rather the continued presence of “occupying troops.”
Mr. Khameni and other Iranian politicians have urged Mr. Maliki’s government not to sign a status of forces agreement being negotiated with the America. The agreement would provide a legal framework for the continued presence of American troops in Iraq after the current U.N. mandate expires at the end of this year.
Iran accuses America of seeking to formalize its permanent domination of Iraq through the SOFA pact. America charges that Iran is working to destabilize Iraq by supplying weapons to Shiite militias. Mr. Maliki’s government is caught in the middle.
The Iraqi daily newspaper Al Mada, in a front-page editorial published yesterday, said Mr. Maliki is being “pulled in opposite directions … the challenge for Iraqis is to handle two friends who are enemies.”
[Elsewhere, the Associated Press reported that American soldiers called in an airstrike yesterday during an attack on a house believed used by foreign fighters, killing five militants and capturing more than a dozen others, the American military said. The firefight broke out when American soldiers, acting on information from an Iraqi prisoner, came under heavy gunfire as they approached the suspected hideout in remote northwestern Iraq.]
