AP, Baghdad, 19 June 2014 [Extract]— With the country in turmoil, rivals of Iraq’s Shiite prime minister are mounting a campaign to force him out of office, with some angling for support from Western backers and regional heavyweights.

On Thursday, their effort received a massive boost from President Barack Obama.

The U.S. leader stopped short of calling for Nouri al-Maliki to resign, saying “it’s not our job to choose Iraq’s leaders.”

But, his carefully worded comments did all but that.
“Only leaders that can govern with an inclusive agenda are going to be able to truly bring the Iraqi people together and help them through this crisis,” Obama declared at the White House.
“We’ve said publicly, that whether he (al-Maliki) is prime minister or any other leader aspires to lead the country, that there has to be an agenda in which Sunni, Shiite and Kurd all feel that they have the opportunity to advance their interest through the political process,” the president said.
Al-Maliki, who rose from relative obscurity to office in 2006, when Iraq’s sectarian bloodletting began to spiral out of control, quickly became known for a tough hand, working in alliance with American forces in the country since the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Over the years that followed, Sunni tribes backed by the Americans rose up to fight al-Qaida-linked militants, while al-Maliki showed a readiness to rein in Shiite militiamen — and by 2008, the violence had eased. Since the withdrawal of American forces in late 2011, however, it has swelled again, stoked in part by al-Maliki himself.
Mohammed al-Khaldi, a top aide to outgoing Sunni speaker of parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, said: “We have asked the Americans, Britain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran to work toward denying al-Maliki a new term.

The Shiite bloc must find a replacement for him.”

A leading Sunni tribal chief also said al-Maliki has to go.”I think that most of Obama’s speech, but not all of it, it was shallow and didn’t address the heart of the matter,” Sheik Ali Hatem al-Suleiman told The Associated Press in the northern Kurdish city of Irbil.

 ”The real problem in Iraq is al-Maliki himself.” “U.S. policy cannot rely on a paralyzed man who has lost control of Iraq, when he is the one who took Iraq to this point.”

Besides the Sunnis and Shiites, al-Maliki’s former Kurdish allies have also been clamoring to deny him a third term in office, charging that he has excluded them from a decision-making circle of close confidants and is meddling in the affairs of their self-rule enclave in the north.
“We wanted him to go, but after what happened last week, we want it even more,” said Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Kurdish politician. Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish region, put the case against al-Maliki much more emphatically.

Without mentioning the prime minister by name, he said al-Maliki had discarded his counsel and he alone now “takes direct responsibility for what happened to Iraq.”