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UAE seeks to sow division among Iraqis: Activist

Saturday, 27 February 2016 4:57 PM [ Last Update: Saturday, 27 February 2016 4:56 PM ]

Iraqi Prime Minster Haider al-Abadi (AFP photo)

Press TV has interviewed Sabah Jawad, director of Iraqi Democrats against Occupation in London, about Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi denouncing comments by the UAE foreign minister who compared Iraq's volunteer forces to militants from Daesh and al-Nusra.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Do you think that UAE foreign minister actually meant what he said when it came to the popular forces of Iraq, forces that have been somewhat successful at least for the time being in fighting these Daesh terrorists?

Jawad: Yes, they feel threatened actually because they are supporters; the United Arab Emirates and Qatar and Saudi Arabia and Turkey support terrorism in the area and are supported by the Americans actually all along and therefore they do not want Daesh to be undermined in anyway and the only effective force against Daesh in Iraq is Popular Mobilization Force, that is why they spewed this venom against the Popular Mobilization Force.

If you ask anybody in the Middle East and in the world about what they consider to be the United Arab Emirates, they will tell you a mini-state controlled by corrupt leaders who spend lavish amount of money on horse racing and buying football grounds and they pretend they are actually superpower. You know, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and states like this in the [Persian] Gulf area, they cannot fool anyone. The only thing it has to be said actually [is] that these people are allowed to say these kinds of things sometimes from Baghdad whether it is the Saudi ambassador, whether it is the Qatari ambassador or whether it is the prime minister of the gas station called the United Arab Emirates. They utter this hatred against the Iraqi people and actually this policy is causing a lot of bloodshed in Iraq because of their support for terrorist organizations and for their tireless effort to undermine the Iraqi state and also to sow division and discontent between the Iraqi people as well.

This is what they want actually. They want to divide Iraq on a Sunni-Shia basis, Christians against Muslims, Muslims against other religions and also to fragment division between the Iraqi Arabs and the Iraqi Kurds in Kurdistan as well.

And they have some success in that because they are spending a lot of money … The Iraqi government actually should obey the popular demand in Iraq that these ambassadors of this country should be expelled because they should be put on the next flight to their mini-states as soon as possible actually because Iraq is better off without them.

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Iraq Turkey Saudi Arabia Middle East Muslims Sunni Muslims Qatar UAE al-Nusra Kurdistan Shia Muslims Popular Mobilization forces Daesh Abdullah Bin Zayed