Al-Sadr: American Nationals Should Leave Iraq Over US Muslim Ban
MEP: Iraq’s Sayyed Moqtada Al-Sadr has criticized President Donald Trump on Sunday over his executive order to ban entry into the US of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries and said American nationals should leave Iraq, in response to the call.
“It would be arrogance for you to enter freely Iraq and other countries while barring them the entrance to your country … and therefore you should get your nationals out,” Sadr said in a statement published on his website on Sunday.
Cited by Reuters, two unnamed Iraqi parliamentarians, meanwhile, said Baghdad was to argue with the US that the travel curbs could affect cooperation against the Takfiri ISIL terrorist group.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani also slammed the US for imposing a travel ban against Iranians and nationals from six other Muslim states and said harboring concerns about terror threats from the Islamic Republic’s nationals “sounds more like a joke.”
Larijani said everyone knows Iran has, over the past years, invariably confronted terrorists, making it a trendsetter, subsequently joined by fellow nations in the region. “Making mention of Iran here under the pretext of concerns about terrorist acts sounds more like a joke,” the top parliamentarian emphasized.
Meanwhile, Iraqi parliament’s foreign affairs committee has decried the measure as “unfair,” and asked the Iraqi government to “reciprocate” the travel curbs imposed on Iraqis.
“We ask the Iraqi government to reciprocate … the decision taken by the US administration,” the committee said in a statement, adding, “Iraq is in the frontline of the war of terrorism … and it is unfair that the Iraqis are treated in this way.”
“We clearly demanded that the Iraqi government deal reciprocally in all issues… with the United States of America,” Hassan Shwairid, the deputy head of the committee, told AFP.
On January 27, Trump signed a sweeping executive order to make good on his promised Muslim Ban.
