By Jon Hurdle PHILADELPHIA, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States on Wednesday urged America not to suddenly withdraw troops from Iraq and to support the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as the best hope for stability. "Just picking and leaving is going to create a huge vacuum," said Prince Turki al-Faisal, hours after the high-level bipartisan Iraq Study Group recommended the United States should begin to withdraw forces and launch a diplomatic push, including Iran and Syria, to avoid chaos in Iraq. "It would be inadvisable in the extreme for the U.S. simply to pack up its forces and withdraw," Turki said at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. "The U.S. must underline its support for the Maliki government because there is no other game in town." Turki said Saudi Arabia does not want Iraq to fracture along ethnic or religious lines and that the kingdom, which is dominated by Sunnis, does not seek to support the minority Iraqi Sunnis against other religious groupings there. "We have never accentuated one sector over another or one ethnicity over another," he said. He said the Saudi government fired Nawaf Obaid, a security consultant, after he wrote a Washington Post commentary suggesting that if U.S. troops left Iraq, Saudi Arabia would step in to protect the Iraqi Sunnis from Shi'ite-dominated Iran. "We felt that we would add more credibility to his claim as an independent contractor by terminating our consultancy agreement with him," Turki told Reuters.
