Iraq to hold regional summit in late August: Prime Minister Kadhemi
Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi says a regional summit will be held in the country later this month.
In a statement on Monday, the office of Kadhemi said Baghdad would be the host of a regional summit late in August, with French President Emmanuel Macron also attending.
It added that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Arabia's King Salman are among the invited leaders, although an exact date has not yet been announced.
The statement did not say whether Iran’s President Ebrahim Raeisi would attend the summit.
Baghdad is seeking to play the role of a mediator between the Islamic Republic and some Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia.
According to the statement, the French leader told the Iraqi premier in a phone call that he planned to visit the Arab country to attend the said conference.
It would be Macron's second visit to the country in less than a year.
Earlier in the day, Raeisi and Macron talked in a phone call, during which the two sides discussed matters of mutual interest as well as negotiations on the revival of Iran’s nuclear deal with the world powers.
In recent months, the Iraqi government has hosted senior Iranian and Saudi officials in an attempt to restore Iran-Saudi Arabia relations, which collapsed in 2016.
In early 2003, the US invaded Iraq under the later debunked pretext that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
It withdrew soldiers from Iraq between 2007 and 2011, but redeployed them in 2014 along with other partners to allegedly counter the threat of the Daesh Takfiri terrorism.
Iraq managed to end the territorial rule of Daesh in the country thanks to the sacrifices of the national army and the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), which had the backing of Iran.
Moreover, anti-US sentiment has been growing in Iraq since the assassination in January 2020 of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of the PMU, along with the region’s legendary anti-terror commander Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.
They were targeted along with their companions in a drone strike authorized by former US President Donald Trump near the Baghdad International Airport.
Two days after the attack, Iraqi lawmakers approved a bill that requires the government to end the presence of all foreign military forces led by the US.
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