BAGHDAD, May 30: Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki said on Tuesday he will overrule squabbling parties in his coalition and present parliament with his personal nominees for two key security posts if they fail to agree this week.
Maliki also told Reuters in an interview that he will fly to Basra on Wednesday to end faction fighting among Shias and that he is ready to use force against ‘gangs’ holding crucial oil exports to ransom.
“There’s no way we can leave Basra, the gateway to Iraq, our imports and exports, at the mercy of criminal, terrorist gangs. We will use force against these gangs,” he said.
Maliki told Reuters that if no consensus was found by the next session of parliament, due on Sunday, he would exercise his constitutional right to put his own nominees to a vote.
“This week is decisive for me. The next parliamentary session is decisive for me. I will offer candidates to parliament, with or without an agreement.”
Speaking three days after a small Shia faction warned it could halt oil exports from Basra to win concessions in Baghdad, Maliki said he would head a high-level delegation to the oil-rich city.
Basra, patrolled by British forces, has seen a sharp deterioration in security over the past year as Shia factions vie for influence.
A suspected roadside bomb killed two British soldiers there on Sunday evening.
Maliki said he was unhappy with some policies on the part of British forces, and said a further complication was foreign ‘infiltrators’ coming across the border from Iran — though he declined to say if he believed they were Iranian.
“We have to go to find solutions ... We have a crisis but it is not an insoluble crisis and,
God willing, our efforts will be enough to find solutions acceptable to all sides involved.”—Reuters
