Only weeks before Iraqi troops and their local and international partners start their push to retake the city of Mosul from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), the leaders of Turkey and Iraq have been caught in a war of words that could derail the Mosul liberation efforts.
“You are not my interlocutor. You are not at my level. You are not my equivalent. You are not of the same quality as me,” said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday, in response to a demand from Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi that Turkey withdraw its troops from Iraq.
“Your screaming and shouting in Iraq is of no importance to us,” he said in a speech to Muslim religious leaders from the Balkans and Central Asia in Istanbul. “You should know that we will go our own way.”
Mosul, home to up to 1.5 million people, has been the headquarters of ISIL’s self-declared caliphate in northern Iraq since 2014. The battle for the city, expected later this month, is likely to shape the post-ISIL Iraq.