Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Sunday said the Middle East unrest has begun to show its impact on Iraq and urged the all factions to reconcile to confront the threat.

"The area is witnessing a violent storm, because of the re- emergence of extremist organizations like al-Qaida and al-Nusra," Maliki said in a speech to his cabinet in the city of Erbil, the capital of the autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq.

"Iraq is part of the area, and we started to get affected by the storm that engulfed the area, therefore, we all have to revive national reconciliation to confront the menace," Maliki said, referring to the impacts that threatens Iraq's fragile stability of the unrest in neighboring Syria and Turkey.

Maliki's Shiite leadership has long been at odds with the Kurds over the distribution of oil wealth and the control of some disputed areas, while the Sunni Arabs have been protesting the government for over five months, accusing him of marginalizing them and his troops of indiscriminately arresting their sons and torturing them.

Moreover, Iraq's Kurdish, Sunni and some Shiite factions have frequently accused the government of killing the democratic process by attempting to gain more power, and evading his commitments to implementing the terms of the power-sharing deal, also known as Erbil agreement.

The deal, reached in November, 2010 in the Kurdistan region, paved the way for Maliki's current partnership government after the Iraqi political rivals ended their differences that lasted eight months following the parliamentary elections on March 7, 2010.

Observers see that Maliki's move in Kurdistan is an attempt to get better relations with the Kurds while confronting the protests of the Sunni Iraqis. Endi

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