While declaring support for Iraq against challenges, the participants condemned extremism and terrorism and supported Baghdad’s efforts to protect its constitution, strengthen governance and build institutions. While supporting Iraq’s efforts for comprehensive development, they pointed out that holding the second round of the conference shows the desire to support Iraq’s central role in the development of regional economic cooperation. The participants renewed their support for Iraq to consolidate the rule of law, strengthen the government, and create institutions capable of advancing progress and reconstruction while respecting the aspirations of the the Iraqi people. Moreover, the attendees emphasized their support for Iraq’s efforts for comprehensive development and their willingness to cooperate with Baghdad in many sectors, including energy, water, electricity, food and health security, transportation, infrastructure projects, and climate protection. They, furthermore, emphasized the importance of cooperation mechanism and launched economic projects and most importantly power grid.
The participating countries have announced cooperation with Iraq to boost its security and fight terrorism while they have so far taken no steps to reduce the country’s crises. Even since the first Baghdad conference, the ISIS terrorist group even broadened its activities. With some of the participants, like Saudi Arabia, obviously supporting ISIS, Iraq faces a bumpy road to stability.
Another topic of discussion was economy, where the participating countries vowed in last year’s conference to help reconstruct Iraqi infrastructure. But in this case, too, they showed no serious moves. Electricity is one of Iraq’s essential challenges that requires help of the regional states, but only Iran is the real helper and others just make actionless promises. According to the agreements made last year, Saudi Arabia was supposed to provide part of Iraq’s power needs, but so far no progress has been made in this regard. The UAE and Qatar are among the other countries that, according to the agreements, must provide part of Iraq’s power, but these countries have not reached a conclusion on the power transfer yet, because the members of the (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council follow Saudi policies in any regional action, and Riyadh has so far shown no green light for connecting Iraq to Persian Gulf power grid.
Reconstruction of Iraq is another issue that requires the attention of foreign countries so that they can reverse the destruction caused by ISIS. But the regional and international powers have not helped the reconstruction process and only limited amounts have been granted to Baghdad by the international community, which are trivial compared to the $30 billion the UN said was necessary to rebuild the effected regions.
Regional stability
Baghdad conference was held as the member states find Iraq stability as a prelude to regional stability and peace and thus they stressed regional cooperation. The participants emphasized that achieving economic development and the success of regional cooperation projects requires constructive regional relations based on the principles of good neighborliness, non-interference in internal affairs, respect for international laws, and acceptance of dialogue as a way to resolve disputes.
Although the participating countries made general comments on regional stability and more focused on Iraq, it is noteworthy that West Asia is not just Iraq whose stability brings regional stability, and important regional issues were very well mentioned by Iran’s representative to attract attention to the challenges the region is grappling with.
“We deeply believe that resolving conflicts in the region, resolving misunderstandings and differences, and reducing common challenges can be done through dialogue between the countries of the region, and we can expand this cooperation to areas of interest,” said Iran’s Foreign Minister Hussein Amir-Abdollahian, adding: “One of the issues that has become a common challenge for many countries in the region in recent years is the dust storms, which requires cooperation to deal with and can become a stimulus and ground for interaction and cooperation in other fields. Also, the special position and geopolitical and economic capacities of the region, including in the field of transportation and transit among Asia, Europe and Africa, with the existence of land and sea transportation routes for the transfer of goods and passengers, can serve the prosperity of the region.”
The top Iranian diplomat also pointed to territorial threats to Iran by terrorist groups, adding Tehran does not expect any threats from Iraq’s soil to the neighbors. The countries present in the meeting talk about stability and cooperation in the region while in addition to Iraq, West Asia saw three other challenges in the past decade, which should be given special attention, because as long as they are not resolved, the regional states cannot talk about cooperation and peace. The Yemen war is one of these challenges which is waged by Saudi Arabia and the UAE as two participants of of Baghdad conference. In the past eight years, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have committed all kinds of crimes against the ill-fated people of Yemen, and despite the efforts of Yemen’s Ansarullah movement to end the war, the aggression coalition has shown no interest in peace, and in recent days, it broaden the scope of attacks on different areas of Yemen. The figures provided by the UN and Ansarullah about human casualties in Yemen are terrible, showing that more than 150, 000 people have been killed, among whom nearly 5, 000 are children. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia accuses Iran of causing tensions in the Persian Gulf while itself has been the main cause of crises over the past decade.
Syria, and recently Lebanon, are countries in which insecurity can effect the regional states negatively and the Saudis are party to their crises. It is clear that the political and economic crisis Lebanon has been struggling with since 2019 is an outcome of the Saudi and American, and even French, obstructions and sanctions that have brought the country to the brink of economic collapse. Saudi Arabia and its Western allies intend to put their pawns in power in Lebanon in order to undermine Hezbollah and its ally Iran. They continue their sanctions against Lebanon until this goal is achieved. Therefore, the participants should have informed the Saudis and the French of the effects and consequences of the continuation of the Lebanese crisis for a solution to be found to the crisis.
On the other hand, such countries as Egypt and Jordan are somehow struggling with economic and security crises and beating them takes cooperation of the members of the conference.
Iran-Saudi tensions
Although meetings between Iranian and Saudi officials were expected on the sidelines of the conference to make way for normalization of relations, there was no plan for this, and even the Saudi officials in their speeches indirectly accused Iran of interfering in the Iraqi affairs under the cover of supporting the security of Iraq.
Iran’s FM pointed to the need for avoiding tensions and war and to protect security and, adding: “We are ready to develop relations with all countries in the region, including friendly countries on the southern coast of the Persian Gulf.” Despite Tehran’s show of interest to improve relations with Riyadh, Saudi officials continue to cause tensions with Iran and use every platform to accuse Tehran of regional interference.
The Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan said that Riyadh is strongly opposed to attacks on Iraq’s territory and individual score settling. The Saudi FM was referring to the Iranian attacks on separatist terrorists in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. These comments come while the Saudis are the biggest sponsors of terrorism in Iraq, and by supporting Takfiri groups, they tried to block Iran’s influence and its allies’ power gain in Iraq.
Baghdad 2 conference ended with a statement promising
contribution to security and stability in Iraq and rebuilding Iraq’s
infrastructure. It remains to see if these promises would help Iraq
settle its problems, or perhaps next year there would be another
gathering with more countries with more unrealized promises.
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