US has abandoned global leadership role, Iraqi Vice President says

The United States has no clear plan for dealing with the various crises it faces in the Middle East, according to one of the top US allies in the fight against ISIS.

The Iraqi Vice President, Ayad Allawi, said the US was "absent" from its traditional role in maintaining global stability.

"There is a vacuum in the overall leadership in the world," Allawi told CNN's Christiane Amanpour, in an interview airing Friday. "The Americans need to ... get back to their role as an international power, an important international power."

"To me, there is no international strategy -- no strategy for the alliances that are fighting and have helped us in this part of the fight."

Iraqi forces, supported by the US, are in pitched battleto retake the last blocks from ISIS control in Western Mosul, the extremist group's last major stronghold in Iraq.

Allawi said that the despite the imminent military victory, the US lacked a broader strategy for fighting extremism, saying it was "absent" and lacked "clear-cut policies."

Speaking in Washington on Wednesday, US National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster insisted that US strategy in the region was working well. "We are being successful with our partners in Syria. We are being successful with our Iraqi partners," he said. "There's still a lot of work to be done."

But Allawi said the US had abandoned its leadership role.

"There is no clear-cut policies where to go and what to do," Allawi said. "Even for Iraq, it's still premature. I think they are still deliberating on a kind of a strategy for Iraq. Nothing yet has materialized."

A wide spectrum of international forces -- including the US, the Kurds, Iran,and the governments of Syria and Iraq, -- have succeeded in fighting ISIS back from the stunning territorial victories it gained in 2014.

Mosul is now almost back in Iraqi government hands; across the border, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a coalition of mainly Kurdish and Arab fighters, launched the final phase of their battle to recapture Raqqa earlier this month.

But Iraq has intelligence that ISIS is attempting to "forge an alliance" with Al Qaeda, the Islamist group from which it was spawned in 2013, Allawi warned.

Discussions are taking place in both Iraq and Syria, he said -- mediated by former al Qaeda members who never joined ISIS. "It is the unification of the evil forces," he said.