Turkish president says will not remove troops from Iraq

“We support the procedures, but we believe the folks will soon be heard in such significant occasions”, he said. “We have to pursue the political track, but if it doesn’t work, force will be the only option”, he said.

According to president Erdogan, troops at the Bashiqa camp are in Iraq to provide training to local fighters and the Kurdish peshmerga.

On Friday, al-Abadi’s foreign ministry sent a letter to the United Nations on the matter, and asked the United Nations Security Council to “shoulder its responsibilities” and order the troops to leave.

Power told reporters following a council meeting on Burundi that any troop deployments in Iraq need to be done with the consent of the Iraqi government.

“I believe that the Security Council at the United Nations knows that this step is not honest and will issue its decision accordingly”, he said.

And Iraq’s top cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, also criticised the Turkish deployment, which he said was done “under the pretext” of supporting the war against IS. Al-Sistani’s spokesman, Sheik Abdul Mehdi Karbala’i, did not explicitly name Turkey.

On Dec. 10, Erdoğan had said it was “out of the question at the moment” that Turkish troops would withdraw from Iraq.

Erdogan’s comments came a day after he met with Iraqi Kurdish leader Massud Barzani, who has long-standing ties with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government.

Approximately 150 Turkish soldiers were deployed near Mosul on December 4 to replace training forces already in the area.

Thousands of Iraqis have taken to the streets of Baghdad and Basra to protest against Turkey’s deployment of troops in the north of the country.

Additionally, protesters burned the Turkish flag in Iraq’s southern oil-rich city of Basra in protest against Turkey’s military incursion into Iraqi soil.

“There’s growing alarm from the Iraqi government”, Power said.

Iraqi government also appealed to the UN Security Council about Turkish forces’ presence seeking assistance in resolving the crisis. Ankara, for its part, insists that the troops are part of an global mission to train and equip Iraqi forces to fight the jihadi extremist group “Islamic State” (“IS”), which still holds large swathes of territory in Iraq.