Iraq condemns conference on peace with Israel

Iraq's federal government on Saturday condemned a conference that took place on Friday in Iraq's Kurdistan autonomous region and in which prominent Shiite and Sunni leaders urged Iraq to make peace with Israel.
 

A statement dismissed the gathering, organized by US think-tank Center for Peace Communications (CPC), as an "illegal meeting".

The conference "was not representative of the population's (opinion) and that of residents in Iraqi cities, in whose name these individuals purported to speak," the statement said.

The office of Iraq's President Barham Saleh, himself a Kurd, joined in the condemnation.

Powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr urged the government to "arrest all the participants", while Ahmed Assadi, an MP with the ex-paramilitary group Hashed al-Shaabi, branded them "traitors in the eyes of the law."

At Friday’s conference, held in the city of Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, local leaders and former generals in the Iraqi army demanded that Iraq join the so-called "Abraham Accords", which were signed last year between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.