Iraq’s Maliki slams report on Mosul fall

Former Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, accused in a parliamentary debate Monday of responsibility in the fall of Iraq’s second largest city Mosul to IS militants in June 2014, is blaming the disaster on Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan and Kurdish regional President Massoud Barzani.

“There is not any worth within the outcome that emerged from the parliamentary investigation committee on the fall of Mosul, which was dominated by political variations and was not goal”, Maliki stated on his Facebook web page.

In the most dramatic step yet to provide accountability for the loss of almost a third of the country’s territory, the assembly endorsed the report that found security and political leaders responsible for the loss of the city.

Various former senior officials were also named in the report detailing the committee’s findings, which has not been publicly released.

“What happened in Mosul was a conspiracy planned in Ankara, then the conspiracy moved to Erbil”, Maliki said in posts on Facebook, referring to the capitals of Turkey and the Kurdistan regional government.

Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that Nouri Kamal al-Maliki, who lost his position after new reforms in Iraq scrapped the seat for three vice presidents, was the chief architect of the crisis in the war-torn country because of his repressive, discriminatory and exclusive policies.

The report criticized the Turkish consul in Nineveh, of which Mosul is the capital, for alleged links to ISIL, and Kurdish peshmerga fighters accused of confiscating weapons and ammunition abandoned by the military. The comments were “prompted by his sense of guilt stemming from having played a part in the invasion of one third of Iraq by Islamic State, the deaths of tens of thousands and the dislocation of millions”.

Over the last year, the U.S.-led coalition has carried out numerous airstrikes against ISIL targets in both Iraq and Syria.

Karasik says Maliki’s accusations are shared by others who claim Ankara “turned a blind eye to the Islamic State problem at the time”, and that the Kurds did not come to the rescue of the Iraqi government when they could have. “So, this has created the situation that Maliki is being held responsible particularly with the Mosul incident”, he said.