Iraq's Maliki slams report on Mosul fall

Baghdad, Aug 18 Iraq's former Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Tuesday slammed as having "no value" a parliamentary report which held him and dozens others of security and political officials responsible for the fall of Iraq's northern city of Mosul to the Islamic State (IS) militant group last year.

"There is no value in the report of the parliamentary investigation panel on the fall of Mosul, as the panel was dominated with political differences and its findings were not objective," Xinhua quoted Maliki as saying on his Facebook page, while he is on a visit to neighbouring Iran.

Maliki said "what happened in Mosul was a conspiracy planned in Ankara, then the conspiracy moved to Arbil", referring to the capitals of Turkey and Iraq's semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan respectively.

On Sunday, a parliamentary investigation panel tasked with probing the fall of Mosul to IS militants finalised its report. It held more than 30 political and security officials responsible for the collapse of the security forces in Mosul in June 2014.

The responsible officials included Maliki, former Mosul governor Atheel al-Nujaifi, former acting Defence Minister Sadoun al-Dulaimi, former army chief of staff Gen. Babakir Zebari and former commander of provincial operations Lt. Gen. Mahdi al-Gharrawi, in addition to other senior officials.

The parliament on Monday referred the report to the country's judiciary without reading it in the parliament session in order to curb the tension between the political blocs, after Maliki's State of Law bloc threatened to walk out of the session in protest against the report that they considered politically biased.

The security situation in Iraq drastically deteriorated since June 10 last year, when bloody clashes broke out between Iraqi security forces and the IS group, an al-Qaida offshoot which took control of the country's northern province of Nineveh and later seized swathes of territories after Iraqi security forces abandoned their posts in other Sunni provinces.