CAIRO, 24 March 2003 — Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said yesterday that no Iraqi city had fallen to US-led forces and alleged that Israel was taking part in the four-day-old war to topple President Saddam Hussein.
“No city has fallen into their hands. Umm Qasr, which is a small, isolated community, is still resisting,” Sabri, the first Iraqi official to travel abroad since the start of the war, told reporters at Cairo’s airport.
The British military said yesterday that coalition troops were encountering small pockets of resistance from elite Iraqi troops in Umm Qasr, Iraq’s only deep water port which is just across the Kuwaiti border.
Fighting is still reported to be taking place round Basra and in Nasiriyah on the Euphrates river.
Sabri, arriving in Egypt after a stop in Syria, also charged that Israel was involved in the war.
Iraq is “sure that the Zionists are participating in the aggression, after having found an Israeli missile,” he said, saying that Baghdad was “fighting a tripartite American-Anglo-Zionist aggression.”
The statement follows a report on official Iraqi television that an Israeli-made missile had been found in Baghdad.
During the 1991 Gulf war, Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel, which exercised restraint after heavy US pressure not to upset the coalition which included a number of Arab countries.
Sabri is in Egypt to attend a meeting today of Arab League foreign ministers which will discuss the war on Iraq.
He said he would ask his counterparts “to condemn the aggression and call for an immediate and retreat of the invaders on our land.”
Sabri will also ask for “condemnation of those who have offered facilities (to the US and British forces) and who are stabbing Iraq in the back — that means the agents and dwarfs who rule Kuwait.”
According to an Arab League source, Kuwait will in turn ask the meeting to condemn Baghdad’s “aggression” against it, in reference to the 12 Iraqi missiles fired at the emirate in the first two days of the war. None of the missiles caused damage or casualties.
Arab foreign ministers try to bridge Arab divisions and forge a unified anti-war position. The meeting at the Arab League headquarters will also try to convince restive Arab populations their governments are doing their best to stop the four-day old war, which has provoked sometimes violent demonstrations across the Arab world, diplomats said.
“The Arab foreign ministers want to see what steps can be taken to stop the war,” Arab League spokesman Hesham Youssef said, adding the ministers would discuss a diplomatic initiative to try to stop the conflict through the United Nations.
The meeting has been scheduled since before the war began, but the start of the conflict has given it greater urgency.
Sabri said on Saturday his country wanted Arab states to take a “true Arab stand” against the war which he said would mirror sentiment on the Arab street.
In Damascus yesterday he said reports that Iraqi leaders had been killed during the war were “fables.”
Thousands of anti-war demonstrators have held protests and in some cases clashed with riot police across the Arab world since the US-led assault began on Thursday. States including Egypt, Morocco and Jordan have called for public calm.
Many Arabs blame their governments for failing to prevent the conflict.
Arab diplomatic efforts in the run-up to the war failed to overcome deep differences between the League’s 22 members on agreeing substantive proposals to help defuse the crisis.
Analysts say the foreign ministers stood equally little chance of halting the war, which aims to unseat the Iraqi government and destroy alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told reporters yesterday Egypt had done all it could to prevent the conflict. “We are not able to do more than we have done,” he said.
One Western diplomat said: “I don’t think we can really expect anything substantive to come out of the foreign ministers’ meeting, and the League doesn’t expect this either.
“But it’s smart diplomacy to meet, compare notes, try to unite ranks and show Arabs are working together.”
