Iraq wants foreign troops out after air strike; Trump threatens sanctions

Members of the Iraqi parliament are seen at the parliament in Baghdad, Iraq 5 January – Iraqi parliament media office/Handout via Reuters

BAGHDAD/WASHINGTON (Reuters): Iraq’s parliament called on Sunday for US and other foreign troops to leave as a backlash grows against the US killing of a top Iranian general, and President Donald Trump doubled down on threats to target Iranian cultural sites if Tehran retaliates.

Deepening a crisis that has heightened fears of a major Middle East conflagration, Iran said it was taking another step back from commitments under a 2015 nuclear deal with six major powers.

Iran’s most prominent general, Qassem Soleimani, was killed on Friday in a US drone strike on his convoy at Baghdad airport, an attack that carried US-Iranian hostilities into uncharted waters.

An Iranian government minister denounced Trump as a “terrorist in a suit” after the US president sent a series of Twitter posts on Saturday threatening to hit 52 Iranian sites, including targets important to Iranian culture, if Tehran attacks Americans or US assets to avenge Soleimani’s death.

Talking to reporters aboard Air Force One on the way to Washington from Florida on Sunday evening, Trump stood by those comments.

“They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural sites? It doesn’t work that way,” he said.

Democratic critics of the Republican president have said Trump was reckless in authorising the strike, and some said his comments about targeting cultural sites amounted to threats to commit war crimes. Many asked why Soleimani, long seen as a threat by US authorities, had to be killed now.

Republicans in Congress have generally backed Trump’s move.

Trump also threatened sanctions against Iraq and said that if US troops were required to leave the country, Iraq’s government would have to pay Washington for the cost of a “very extraordinarily expensive” air base there.

He said if Iraq asked US forces to leave on an unfriendly basis, “we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.”