PARIS
Iraq is not getting enough support from the international community to fight Daesh, the country’s prime minister has claimed.
Haidar al-Abadi was speaking in Paris on Tuesday ahead of an international anti-Daesh conference.
Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu will join counterparts from countries involved in international anti-Daesh coalition to develop ways of halting the advance of the Sunni extremist militia which controls large parts of Iraq and Syria.
Iraq has plunged into a security vacuum since June 2014, when Daesh stormed the northern province of Mosul and declared what it called a caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
Daesh massacres and the forced deportation of minority populations led to the creation of an international coalition against the terror group. The U.S.-led coalition has been staging airstrikes against Daesh objectives in Iraq and Syria since mid-September 2014.
However, Abadi said that the coalition’s air forces were failing to supply the Iraqi army with enough intelligence on the militants.
“The air support is not enough; Daesh movements are not being monitored enough,” he said, adding that militants were continuously moving around the region in small groups.
Abadi said that the international coalition had promised many things to the Iraqi authorities but few of these had been delivered.
“We did not get enough weapons and munitions,” he said, adding that the Iraqi authorities were forced to move on and fight with their own capabilities.
The PM also claimed that the previous Iraqi government had paid for weapons from Russia but were unable to receive them following U.S. sanctions imposed on Moscow.
He called on the international community to allow the Iraqi government to buy weapons.
