Gulf Papers Criticize U.S. For Supporting Al-Maliki: The Obama Administration Has Abandoned The Sunnis In Favor Of The Shi'ites.

Gulf Papers Criticize U.S. For Supporting Al-Maliki: The Obama Administration Has Abandoned The Sunnis In Favor Of The Shi'ites.HT: Memri.

The U.S.'s announcement that it supports the Iraqi government's campaign against the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Al-Anbar governorate in western Iraq, and that it would supply  Iraq with missiles and drones for this purpose, sparked harsh criticism by columnists and newspaper editors in the Gulf.[1]

According to the writers, the war being waged by Iraq's Shi'ite prime minister, Nouri Al-Maliki, is not just against Al-Qaeda but against Sunnis in general – and therefore the U.S.'s support for him is support for the Shi'ite axis, led by Iran, which also includes the Assad regime in Syria and Hizbullah in Lebanon, at the expense of the Sunnis.

This criticism is another expression of the disappointment in Arab countries in general and in the Gulf States in particular with U.S. policy in the region in recent months, and their feeling that they have been abandoned to Iranian hands. This feeling intensified following the U.S.-Russia agreement on the dismantling of Syria's chemical weapons and after the deal between the superpowers and Iran over the latter's nuclear dossier.[2]
Below are excerpts from articles published in the Gulf press in the past week claiming that the U.S. sides with the Shi'ite axis.

Al-Sharq Al-Awsat Columnist: The U.S. Is Supporting The Shi'ite War Against The Sunnis

Huda Al-Husseini, a columnist for the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, claimed in an article that the struggle in Iraq is a sectarian struggle and that, by supporting Al-Maliki, the U.S. is supporting Shi'ite extremism.

Al-Husseini stated further that the U.S. is deluding the Shi'ite extremists into thinking that they can defeat the Sunnis, who constitute a majority in the Muslim world, in order to prepare the ground for a bloody war. This, instead of calling on Al-Maliki to talk to the Sunnis, just as it called upon the Egyptian military to talk to the Muslim Brotherhood.

She wrote: "...There is a Sunni Iraqi revolution against Al-Maliki's dictatorship. This is a known and documented fact. The surprising thing is that the U.S. is equipping Al-Maliki's government with Hellfire missiles and drones that will arrive in Iraq this March, in order to fight Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Even Iran expressed its willingness to send troops – possibly from the Basij's Qods Force – to assist Al-Maliki in confronting the Sunnis in Al-Anbar, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in response that if Iran dispatched forces, his country would do the same...

"The Sunnis in Iraq are rebelling against Al-Maliki's discrimination [against them]. Even [Shi'ite leaders] 'Iyad 'Allawi [a secular Shi'ite and the former interim prime minister] and Muqtada Al-Sadr [an influential Shi'ite cleric and politician] have urged Al-Maliki to meet the Sunni demands. The head of the Al-Dulaim tribe, 'Ali Hatem Al-Suleiman, said: 'neither ISIS nor its ilk – it is we who are fighting Al-Maliki. All Sunni politicians in Iraq form a single front against the sectarian, discriminatory Al-Maliki regime.' 

The Iraqi government is despised in Sunni areas and so is Al-Qaeda. Sheikh 'Abd Al-Malik Al-Sa'di, an influential Sunni cleric, has accused Al-Maliki of bringing sectarianism and poverty to Iraq and called on tribal leaders to fight him.

"No element in the region is neutral. The U.S.'s decision to arm the Al-Maliki government, which [in turn] arms the Syrian regime with militias and enables Iranian planes laden with arms [for the Syrian regime] to pass through its airspace, means that [the U.S.] has decided to support sectarian extremism, which in this case is Shi'ite...Read the full story here.