Iran sends troops to reinforce Iraq

Tehran: Even as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Saturday that Iran is ready to support Iraq from the mortal threat fast spreading through the country, it has been reported that the country has sent 2,000 advance troops to Iraq in the past 48 hours to help tackle a jihadist insurgency, reported the Guardian.

The Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki also called on citizens to take up arms in their country’s defence.

Addressing the country on Saturday, Mr Maliki said rebels from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant had given “an incentive to the army and to Iraqis to act bravely”.

His call to arms came after reports surfaced that hundreds of young men were flocking to volunteer centres across Baghdad to join the fight against ISIL.

In Iran, Mr Rouhani raised the prospect of Teheran cooperating with its old enemy Washington to defeat the Sunni insurgent group – which is attempting to ignite a sectarian war beyond Iraq’s borders.

The Iraqi official said 1,500 basiji forces had crossed the border into the town of Khanaqin, in Diyala province, in central Iraq on Friday, while another 500 had entered the Badra Jassan area in Wasat province overnight.

There is growing evidence in Baghdad of Shia militias continuing to reorganise, with some heading to the central city of Samarra, 110km north of the capital, to defend two Shia shrines from Sunni jihadist groups surrounding them.

The volunteers signing up were responding to a call by Iraq’s most revered Shia cleric, the Iranian-born grand ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to defend their country after Isis seized Mosul and Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit in a lightning advance this week. Samarra is now the next town in the Islamists’ path to Baghdad. “Citizens who can carry weapons and fight the terrorists in defence of their country, should volunteer and join the security forces,” Sistani’s aide said.