Mahdi Marches Against ISIS
Volunteers march with Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr‘s Mehdi Army march in Najaf, Iraq, vowing to defend the city from the Sunni ISIS insurgents.
Iraqi government forces led by a U.S.-trained
commander lost control of another key northern Iraqi city to Sunni
extremists on Monday, triggering warnings from neighboring Turkey that
the escalating violence risked opening another front in sectarian fighting.
The loss of Tal Afar
and the defeat of one of Iraq’s top generals underlined the fragility of
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government and raised fresh
questions about its ability to counter advances by fighters of the
Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, as the extremist Sunni
militants are called.
As worries continued to mount over the Baghdad government’s
ability to counter the ISIS threat, a U.S. official said the U.S. and
Iran may hold talks as early as Monday on the spiraling violence there.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said talks were possible on the
sidelines of this week’s nuclear negotiations in Vienna.
A senior Iranian official told The Wall Street Journal on
Monday evening in Vienna that there had been no bilateral discussions
with U.S. officials so far on the Iraq crisis at the talks. The official
said Iran’s only meeting with the U.S. was in the publicly announced
three-way meeting that included the European Union’s negotiating team.
“They only discussed the nuclear issue,” the official said of the meeting.
A U.S. State Department spokeswoman declined to comment.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday that
Washington was “open to discussions” with Tehran about the military
offensive by extremist Sunnis in Iraq. Mr. Kerry said he would “not rule
out” possible military cooperation with Iran.
But the White House on Monday ruled out coordinated military
action. “Any conversation with the Iranian regime will not include
military coordination,” Mr. Earnest told reporters traveling with
President Barack Obama on Air Force One. “We’re not interested in any
effort to coordinate military activity with Iran.”
As the U.S. and Iran prepare for talks on the declining situation in Iraq, some experts say that Washington should not engage with terrorist organizations. Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, discusses this view.
Kurdish fighters and forces loyal to Mr. Maliki, including
soldiers from an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, have
been frantically trying to defend northern Iraq since ISIS took control
of Mosul last week, with unconfirmed reports of fighting west of Mosul
and near Iraq’s border with Syria.
An Iranian soldier from Quds Force, the IRGC’s elite overseas
branch, was killed in Iraq fighting Sunni extremists, news agencies
affiliated with Iran’s government reported on Monday.
International officials, alarmed at reports of mass killings
committed by ISIS troops over the weekend, and Iraqi officials continued
to investigate the incidents around Mosul, but conceded that facts were
difficult to compile amid the fighting.
The United Nations’ top human-rights official, Navi Pillay,
said the number of people killed hasn’t been verified, but that her
agency is paying “particular scrutiny” to ISIS, given what she called
“their well-documented record of committing grave international crimes
in Syria.”
In a small piece of positive news for Mr. Maliki, the leader of
the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, the autonomous Kurdish government’s
independent fighting force, reported that his men had taken over the
Rabia’a border crossing with Syria, northwest of Mosul.
If the claim is true, ISIS could lose a key avenue for receiving reinforcements from Syria.
Margaret Coker in London, Laurence Norman in
Vienna and Jay Solomon and Jeffrey Sparshott in Washington contributed
to this article.
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