BAGHDAD -- U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned Mideast nations Wednesday against taking new military action in Iraq that might heighten sectarian divisions, after Syria launched airstrikes across the border and Iran flew surveillance drones over the neighboring country.
The U.S. and a senior Iraqi military official confirmed that Syrian warplanes bombed militants' positions Tuesday in and near the border crossing in the town of Qaim. The Iraqi official said Iraq's other neighbors -- Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey -- were all bolstering flights just inside their airspace to monitor the situation. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Qaim, where the Syrian airstrikes took place, is in the vast and mostly Sunni Anbar province. Its provincial government spokesman, Dhari al-Rishawi, said Tuesday that 17 people were killed in an air raid there.
American officials said the strikes appeared to be the work of Syrian President Bashar Assad's government. They said the target was the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a Sunni extremist group that seeks to carve out a purist Islamic enclave across both sides of the Syria-Iraq border.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials said Wednesday that Iran has been flying surveillance drones over Iraq from an airfield in Baghdad and is supplying Iraqi forces with tons of military equipment and other supplies. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the issue.
Kerry warned Wednesday against other countries taking action in Iraq.
"We've made it clear to everyone in the region that we don't need anything to take place that might exacerbate the sectarian divisions that are already at a heightened level of tension," Kerry said, speaking at a meeting of diplomats from NATO nations in Brussels. "It's already important that nothing take place that contributes to the extremism or could act as a flash point with respects to the sectarian divide."
Kerry also said Baghdad needs to take steps to ensure that Iraq's military can defend the country without relying on outside forces.
Both the U.S. and Iran have small numbers of military advisers in Iraq. As many as 300 U.S. commandos are being deployed to assess Iraqi forces and the deteriorating security situation while about a dozen officers from Iran's paramilitary Quds Force have been sent to advise Iraqi commanders and to help mobilize more than 2,000 Shiites from southern Iraq, U.S. officials said.
Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force, has paid at least two visits to Iraq to help Iraqi military advisers plot strategy, officials said, and Iranian transport planes have been making twice-daily flights to Baghdad with military equipment and supplies, 70 tons per flight.
"It's a substantial amount," said a senior U.S. official. "It's not necessarily heavy weaponry, but it is not just light arms and ammunition."
The involvement of Syria and Iran in the Iraqi conflict suggests a developing Shiite axis among the three governments in response to the raging Sunni insurgency.
On Wednesday, a Syrian activist group reported that a group of fighters from al-Qaida's Syrian affiliate defected and joined the rival Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said senior members of the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front based in the Syrian border town of Boukamal traveled to the Iraqi frontier town of Rabia on Sunday, where they pledged loyalty to the Islamic State.
The two rebel factions have been engaged in deadly infighting across opposition-held territory in northern Syria for months, undermining their larger goal of toppling Assad.
Al-Qaida's central leadership broke with the Islamic State earlier this year, in part because of its brutality and refusal to heed calls to stem the infighting. Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri then reaffirmed that Nusra Front is al-Qaida's branch in Syria. But the Islamic State has in recent days succeeded in grabbing vast sections of territory along the Iraqi-Syrian border, including two border crossings.
The U.S., Iran and Syria now find themselves with overlapping interests in stabilizing Iraq's government.
U.S. officials believe the leadership in Baghdad should seek to draw Sunni support away from the militants led by the Islamic State. The insurgency has drawn support from disaffected Iraqi Sunnis who are angry over perceived mistreatment and random detentions by the Shiite-led government.
Kerry said Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appears to be standing by his commitment to start building a new government that fully represents its Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish population. But he said the U.S. is watching closely to make sure any new political process does not repeat past mistakes of excluding Iraq's minority groups.
On Wednesday, al-Maliki rejected calls for an interim "national salvation government" in his first public statement since Obama challenged him last week to create a more inclusive leadership or risk a sectarian civil war.
Several politicians, including Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite who has been named as a possible contender to replace al-Maliki, have called on him to step down and form an interim government that could provide leadership until a more permanent solution can be found.
Al-Maliki, however, insisted the political process must be allowed to proceed after recent national elections in which his bloc won the largest share of parliament seats.
"The call to form a national salvation government represents a coup against the constitution and the political process," he said. He added that "rebels against the constitution" -- a thinly veiled reference to his Sunni political rivals -- posed a more serious danger to Iraq than the militants.
He called on "political forces" to close ranks in the face of the growing threat by insurgents, but took no concrete steps to meet U.S. demands for greater inclusion of the Sunni minority group.
Al-Maliki's coalition, the State of the Law, won the 92 seats of the 328-member parliament in the election. Al-Maliki needs the support of a simple majority to hold on to the job for another four-year term.
The legislature is expected to meet before the end of the month, when it will elect a speaker. It has 30 days to elect a new president, who in turn will select the leader of the majority bloc in parliament to form the next government.
As the fighting continued Wednesday, government and allied forces battled Sunni militants threatening a major military air base in Balad, north of Baghdad, military officials said. The militants had advanced into the nearby town of Yathrib, just 3 miles from the former U.S. base, which was known as Camp Anaconda. The officials said the base was not in immediate danger of falling into the hands of the militants.
South of Baghdad, a suicide bomber blew himself up at an outdoor market in a Shiite area of Mahmoudiya on Wednesday, killing 15 people and wounding 30, police and hospital officials said. No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but it bore the hallmarks of Sunni militants who have for years targeted security forces and Shiite civilians.
Mortar shells also slammed into different areas in the city, killing six more people and wounding 11, the officials said.
And in the northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk, a suicide bomber struck a checkpoint manned by Kurdish security forces, killing six people, including four civilians, the city's deputy police chief Maj. Gen. Torhan Abdul-Rahman Youssef said.
Earlier Wednesday, Sunni militants launched a dawn raid on an Iraqi oil refinery that they have been trying to take for days, but security forces fought them back, said Col. Ali al-Quraishi, the commander of the Iraqi forces on the scene.
A mortar shell also smashed into a house in Jalula, northeast of Baghdad, killing a woman and her two children. The town in Diyala province is under the control of Kurdish fighters known as peshmerga.
Also, a report by Iran's semiofficial Fars news agency said an attack near Iran's western border with Iraq killed three Iranian border guards Tuesday night. A local security official, Shahriar Heidari, said an unspecified "terrorist group" was behind the attack but provided no details.
Information for this article was contributed by Hamza Hendawi, Lara Jakes, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Sameer N. Yacoub, Sinan Salaheddin, Julie Pace, Lolita C. Baldor, Zeina Karam and Barbara Surk of The Associated Press and by Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times.
A Section on 06/26/2014