Local Editor

US War Secretary Jim Mattis arrived in Baghdad on an unannounced visit, reportedly for discussions on defeating the Islamic State terrorist group. He said earlier on Monday that the US military is not in Iraq "to seize anybody's oil."

"I think all of us here in this room, all of us in America, have generally paid for our gas and oil all along and I'm sure that we will continue to do so in the future," Mattis told a small group of reporters traveling with him, while discussing his top objectives for the trip, Reuters reports.

"We're not in Iraq to seize anybody's oil," he stressed.

Mattis appears to have distanced himself from remarks made by US President Donald Trump in a speech last month, when the new Republican president told CIA officials: "We should've kept the oil. But, OK, maybe we'll have another chance."

He later explained his position in a lengthy interview with ABC.

Trump said the Takfiri Daesh [Arabic acronym for "ISIS" / "ISIL"] would not have become a global threat if it hadn't taken over Iraq's oil industry when the country was left weakened by the war.

"We should've kept the oil when we got out. And, you know, it's very interesting, had we taken the oil, you wouldn't have ‘ISIS', because they fuel themselves with the oil. That's where they got the money. They got the money... when we left, we left Iraq, which wasn't a government," Trump said.

"We created a vacuum and ‘ISIS' formed. But had we taken the oil, something else very good would've happened. They would not have been able to fuel their rather unbelievable drive to destroy large portions of the world," Trump noted, while adding that Iraq's oil could had been beneficial for the US too, as the country's budget had been drained by involvement in Middle East wars.

On Sunday, Iraqi forces launched a major military operation to retake the western part of Mosul from the Daesh terrorists.

Last week, Iraqi aircraft dropped millions of leaflets in western Mosul, calling on residents to get ready to welcome the Iraqi troops, as the siege on the militants continues.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team