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Iraq cannot stop Iran arms transfers to Syria
 Iraq lacks the means to stop Iranian arms deliveries to Syria through its airspace, if there are any, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said in comments published on Saturday. Zebari said he had urged Western governments to take action themselves if they were convinced that Iran was smuggling weapons to its Syrian ally.Zebari said Western governments were convinced such an air bridge existed and that his response was: "This does not have my consent, and I do not have the means to prevent it." He said the Shiite-led government in Baghdad had urged Tehran "not to use relations with (Iraq) to send arms to others." "We reject and condemn the shipping of arms through our airspace, and we will tell the Iranian side of that officially, but we cannot stop it," Zebari said. Zebari, himself a Sunni Kurd, said last month that he could not deny that Iraqi Shiites were fighting in Syria alongside the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, whose Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shiite Islam. But he stressed that their involvement in the conflict "does not come under government policy." Posted by: Pappy 2013-07-14 |
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