Iraqi president says Turkish deployment inside Iraq violates global law

Neverthless, Iraq’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Turkish ambassador in Baghdad to protest at the deployment of Turkish forces and demanded their immediate withdrawal.

“This is considered as a grave violation to Iraq’s sovereignty and does not respect good neighborly relations between Iraq and Turkey”, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said. “I want Turkish officials to get the force out of Iraqi territory immediately”.

He said the Turkish forces are training but not arming Sunni fighters.

Turkey committed a “hostile act” by deploying troops to northern Iraq, according to the Foreign Ministry in Baghdad.

Ankara has acknowledged that it has sent 150 troops to the Mosul region on Friday to replace soldiers already helping in the conflict with ISIL.

USA officials in Washington said they were aware of Turkey’s move, but it was not coordinated with the anti-IS coalition operating in northern Iraq.

Turkish sources said the Turkish troops were deployed to provide training for Iraqi troops near Mosul, a city of more than 1 million people that Islamic State (IS) fighters captured in July 2014.

In May, Islamic State’s recapture of the western city of Ramadi was widely seen as a test of the Iraqi army’s preparedness for a planned future offensive to route the group from Mosul and cast serious doubts on the imminence of such a battle.

The camp is used by a force called Hashid Watani (national mobilisation), which is made up of mainly Sunni Arab former Iraqi police and volunteers from Mosul.

A local Kurdish commander described the deployment as a routine rotation by Turkish trainers, but a subsequent statement by the Kurdish regional government pointed to increased Turkish activity.

Turkey’s move lends more credence to the notion that its main Iraqi partner in the fight against ISIS isn’t the Iraqi government, but the semi-autonomous Kurdish regions in the country’s north, which have a history of supplying Turkey with much-needed energy. A battalion of soldiers has gone there.

However, the Turkish authorities have not officially confirmed the news yet.

Turkey depends on outside suppliers for 90.5 percent of its oil and 98.5 percent of its natural gas, the president said. The Kurdish Peshmerga forces of northern Iraq are involved in the training.