“The situation is calm at the border and the military units are on high alert. I want assure the Iraqi people that everything is under control,” Abbasi told Rudaw’s Halkawt Aziz in Baghdad.
The minister noted that there are high coordination with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) officials and the Peshmerga ministry to secure the border areas.
“Our brother, the Peshmerga Chief of Staff, attended the meeting of the National Security Council, and there is high coordination between us,” he said.
Iraqi officials, including the defense minister, visited the army in the bordering areas with Syria on Saturday to monitor the preparations, and ensure that the fight does not spill into Iraq, including a possible infiltration of Jihadist militants into the country.
The minister also conducted an “aerial reconnaissance tour along the Iraq-Syria border strip” to inspect measures taken by the security forces, according to a statement from his office.
A coalition of Syrian rebel groups, led by the jihadist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), have made a dramatic grab of territory in northern Syria over the past week. They took control of the northern city of Aleppo, the largest in the country, and advanced their offensive into Hama province.
The Syrian army on Monday said it began carrying out deadly strikes with top ally Russia against advancing rebels and jihadists in the north and has begun pushing them back across three provinces.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Monday said that the developments are part of a wider plan to divide the region, in a phone call with his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian, with Tehran also a key backer of Damascus.
Assad vowed that the escalation “will only increase Syria’s determination to confront and eliminate terrorists in all Syrian territories,” while Pezeshkian reaffirmed support for Damascus.
But both Iran and Russia are in very different positions from the last time they jumped to Assad’s assistance to dislodge the rebels across the country. Russia is at war in Ukraine and Iran’s network of proxies has been weakened by Israel.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, placed the death toll in five days of fighting at 446, including 200 and 44 militants from HTS and SNA respectively, 141 Syrian army soldiers, and 61 civilians.
Over 20,000 Syrians have been displaced within Aleppo due to the recent surge of violence, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
