A Baghdad court issued an arrest warrant Sunday for two people who participated in a conference that took place on Friday in Iraq's Kurdistan autonomous region and in which prominent Shiite and Sunni leaders urged Iraq to make peace with Israel.
The warrants are for Sahar al-Ta’i, a senior official in Iraq’s Culture Ministry, and for Wisam al-Hardan, a tribal leader who called for peace with Israel in an Op Ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Friday.
Iraqi authorities said that the other attendees of the conference, who number about 500, would be arrested "as soon as their identities become known."
At Friday’s conference, held in the city of Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, the leaders and former generals in the Iraqi army demanded that Iraq join the US-brokered "Abraham Accords", which were signed last year between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
The conference, which was broadcast live on several social media networks, featured, among others, Chemi Peres, the son of the late President and Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who spoke in Hebrew about the need for peace.
While the Abraham Accords were an initiative of former US President Donald Trump, they have been backed by the Biden administration as well.
The Iraqi government condemned the conference as "not representative of the population's (opinion) and that of residents in Iraqi cities, in whose name these individuals purported to speak."