China Offers Iraq Help in Fighting ISIS

Posted by on Dec 13, 2014 in Blog | 0 comments

If this FT report is accurate, it means China is stepping up its involvement in the Middle East, albeit not with boots on the ground but through intelligence support and logistics.  China’s growing investments throughout the region requires greater engagement in the form of advisors, personal training, and the supply of certain arms and munitions.  The only exception to China’s reluctance to send troops abroad is dispatching peacekeeping soldiers to troubled regions such as Lebanon and Mali and personnel for anti-land mine operations as well as building roads and the such or escorting ships off the coast of Africa to fend off pirates under UN mandate.

In any case, due to its long standing principle of non-interference, China is hard pressed to get involved in any foreign-led expeditionary force, even at the invitation of the host country.  So, contrary to active Western imaginations and wishful-thinking, you won’t be seeing the Liaoning aircraft carrier sailing to the Persian Gulf and J-15 carrying out sorties into Iraq or Syria any time soon.

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China has offered to help Iraq defeat Sunni extremists with support for air strikes, according to Ibrahim Jafari, Iraq’s foreign minister.

Wang Yi, Mr Jafari’s Chinese counterpart, made the offer to help defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis, when the two men met in New York at September’s UN antiterrorism meeting, Mr Jafari said.

Any Chinese assistance would be outside the US-led coalition. “[Mr Wang] said, our policy does not allow us to get involved in the international coalition,” Mr Jafari told the Financial Times in Tehran, where he was attending an anti-extremism conference this week.

“I welcomed this initiative. I told him . . . we are ready to deal with the coalition and also co-operate with countries outside this coalition.”

China’s official policy is of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs. Although it does sell weapons to many other countries, China has avoided direct military involvement beyond its borders.

Growing economic and strategic interests have tested that policy. China’s navy began escorting ship convoys around the Horn of Africa after Somali piracy threatened oil and ore cargoes. Last year for the first time it contributed troops to a UN peacekeeping operation in Mali. A battalion of 700 Chinese troops is now joining UN Peacekeepers in South Sudan, with a mandate to guard Chinese-invested oilfields there.

Isis has taken swaths of Iraqi territory since June. The US has led the air strikes on the Islamist group’s positions in Iraq and parts of Syria over the past four months. Pentagon claims that Iran launched separate air strikes last month have not been confirmed.

China’s defence ministry declined to comment on Mr Jafari’s remarks. Hong Lei, a foreign ministry spokesman, would not comment on whether China was supplying air support or missiles. In their meeting, Mr Wang had told Mr Jafari China backed Iraq’s efforts to strengthen its anti-terror capacity, including intelligence exchange and personnel training, Mr Hong said.

“China has been fighting terrorism and has been providing support and assistance to Iraq, including the Kurdish region, in our own way, and we will continue to do so within the best of our capabilities,” Mr Hong said.

China is the largest foreign investor in Iraq’s oil sector and stands to lose the billions its state-owned groups have ploughed into the country if the fields are lost to the insurgents. Sinopec operates in Kurdistan, while China National Petroleum Corp has interests in the Rumaila field near Basra and in Maysan province near the Iranian border. CNPC has already in effect abandoned oilfields it operated in Syria.

Global Times, the Chinese newspaper, reported this week that Isis crews were dismantling equipment at a small refinery west of Baiji in which a Chinese company has invested for use at refineries the group controls in Mosul, Iraq’s second-biggest city.