NEW YORK, Sept 21: Washington’s policy in Iraq is widening sectarian divisions to the point of effectively handing the country to Iran, Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal said on Tuesday.
“Iraq’s people have been separated from each other,” Prince Faisal told the Council of Foreign Relations in New York. “You talk now about Sunnis as if they were separate entity from the Shias.”
He urged the United States to work ‘to bring these people together’.
Saudi Arabia has voiced fears that an Iraqi constitution, due to be put to a referendum in four weeks, could split the country apart and disenfranchise the Sunni community.
“If you allow civil war, Iraq is finished forever,” Prince Faisal said.
Such a conflict, he said, would bring in Iran because of its interest in the Shia-dominated southern part of Iraq, the Turks because of their concern about an autonomous Kurdish entity surfacing in the north, and Arab nations in the region.
“We fought a war together to keep Iran out of Iraq after Iraq was driven out of Kuwait,” said the prince, referring to the first Gulf war in 1991, when Saudi Arabia fought with US and other allied forces to liberate Kuwait.
“Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason,” he said.
IRANIAN INROADS: Iranians, Prince Faisal said, go into areas that American forces have pacified and ‘pay money ... install their own people (and) even establish police forces and arm the militias that are there’.
“And they are protected in doing all this by the British and American forces,” he added.
Turning to another area of friction, Prince Faisal pointed to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as ‘the main overriding issue that separates’ the Islamic world and the United States.
He said Palestinian security services had been weakened by Israeli military action and it was ‘too much’ to expect they could control militant groups such as Hamas.
“Hamas is better armed than them,” he said.
Israel has said there could be no move towards a Palestinian state until militants are disarmed.
Prince Faisal said he disagreed with US President George Bush’s thesis that tyrannical governments in the Middle East and other Islamic regions were the source and sustenance of extremists.—Reuters
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