Iraq dismisses talk of border pullback as Saudi troops reportedly move in

Iraqi military officials have dismissed claims that their troops have been pulled back from the border with Saudi Arabia, despite reports that tens of thousands of Saudi soldiers have been sent to the area as a security measure.

Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya television said 30,000 members of the country’s military had been deployed into the border region after Iraqi government forces abandoned positions, leaving the Saudi frontier unprotected.

But Baghdad described the report as “false news” aimed at sapping the morale of government fighters.

Saudi Arabia aims to guard its 500-mile border with Iraq, where Islamic State fighters and other Sunni Muslim rebel groups seized towns and cities in a lightning advance last month. Saudi King Abdullah has ordered all necessary measures to protect the kingdom against potential "terrorist threats," state news agency SPA reported on Thursday.

The satellite channel said it had obtained a video showing about 2,500 Iraqi soldiers in the desert area east of the Iraqi city of Karbala after pulling back from the border.

An officer in the video aired by Al-Arabiya said the soldiers had been ordered to quit their posts without justification.

The authenticity of the recording could not immediately be verified, and the Iraqi government denied the reports. Lt. Gen. Qassim Atta, an Iraqi army spokesman, said, "This is false news aimed at affecting the morale of our people and the morale of our heroic fighters." 

Iraq is in the midst of a conflict with Sunni fighters in the north and west of the country, and has launched an offensive in Tikrit to recapture territory it lost during a massive rebel advance in June.

Thousands of soldiers, backed by tanks, artillery and aerial cover, have made limited progress in retaking the city, the AFP news agency reported.

The Iraqi government has asked allies for help in tackling the rebellion, but has received only a limited response from the U.S.

Washington has sent 300 military advisers to Baghdad, falling short of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's request for weapons, including an expedited delivery of F-16 jets due for delivery later this year.

The Iraqis have instead turned to Russia and, reportedly, Iran. Russia sold Iraq a dozen Sukhoi-25 jets. Meanwhile, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies has said three Sukhoi jets shown landing in Iraq in a video released by the Defense Ministry were probably from Iran.

Tehran has pledged to aid Iraq against the rebels, who are motivated, in part, by Iran's alleged influence on the Iraqi government.

Meanwhile, in a further indication that Iraq’s territorial integrity is being threatened, the president of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish north asked the region's parliament on Thursday to prepare the way for a referendum on independence, according to lawmakers who attended the closed session.

Iraq's 5 million Kurds, who have ruled themselves within Iraq in relative peace since the 1990s, have expanded their territory by up to 40 percent in recent weeks as Sunni Islamist militants seized vast stretches of western and northern Iraq.

Though calls for a referendum on independence are not new — Kurds strongly backed independence in a nonbinding 2005 vote — the dramatic change in the situation on the ground means the Kurds now see a fully sovereign state as within their grasp.

"The president asked us to form an independent electoral commission to carry out a referendum in the Kurdistan region and determine the way forward," said lawmaker Farhad Sofi, a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

President Massoud Barzani did not offer a timetable on the proposed commission's work of organizing a referendum, several Kurdish lawmakers told Reuters. They said Barzani had asked parliament to choose a date for the vote.

The U.S. has urged Barzani to stick with Baghdad, though the Kurdish leader said during a meeting last month with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that it was "very difficult" to imagine Iraq staying together.

Referring to the seizure of disputed territory in Kirkuk by Kurdish forces known as the peshmerga, Maliki accused the Kurds on Wednesday of "exploiting current events in order to impose a reality" and called the move unacceptable.

Al Jazeera and wire services