Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has firmly dismissed Israel’s recent complaint to the UN Security Council, which accused Iraq’s Iran-backed militias of launching strikes on Israeli targets. Al-Sudani counter-reacted by labeling the charges a “pretext and pretext for attack upon Iraq” and a “scheme to extend the war in the area.
This controversy started when an Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Saar, published on X (formerly called Twitter) a letter he had posted to the UN. In that, Saar wrote, “The right of Israel to self-defense, for Israel, is absolute, and Israel will take whatever actions are necessary to defend and protect citizens from the ‘contemporaneous coming flows of violence’ perpetrated by their Iranian-proxy militias from Iraq.”.
The militias in focus belong to a faction with the label of “Islamic Resistance in Iraq. There is action from these forces, which are alleged to be at the orders of Iran, directed at Israeli targets on a sustained basis over the last few months in the form of drone attacks. The attacks are described as a display of support for Hamas and Hezbollah, two of Israel’s major enemies in current Middle Eastern hostilities.
Saar also mentioned that some of the militias are affiliated with the Popular Mobilization Forces, a coalition largely made up of Shiite militias that-while theoretically part of Iraqi military-commonly act with significant separation from state control.
In it, he urges the Iraqi government to intervene and stop these attacks. He appeals to the Prime Minister, al-Sudani, “to take immediate action in order to stop and prevent such strikes from taking place.”.
But Iraq’s leadership is having none of it. Al-Sudani’s office issued a press release on Tuesday which denied the charges from Israel and announced that Iraq is not planning to be pulled into the growing conflict. The assertion said that the attention of Iraq was committed to giving humanitarian aid to the Palestinians and Lebanese rather than military confrontation.
For now, al-Sudani appears to be dead-set on keeping Iraq out of the burgeoning regional tensions, despite Israel’s warnings. Yet, the situation in the Middle East is fragile, and one question remains as to how long Iraq will remain unaligned in this emerging conflict.
