US President Barack Obama has ordered US warplanes back into Iraqi skies to stop jihadists from moving into autonomous Kurdistan and carrying out a potential genocide against displaced minorities.
The US air armada’s first mission was to drop food and water to thousands of people who have been hiding from the Sunni militants in a northern mountain range.
Three years after he ended eight years of US occupation, Obama announced late on Thursday that he had authorized limited airstrikes against the Islamic State group, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Photo: AFP
Many people who have been in the Sinjar mountains for five days in searing heat and with no supplies are Yazidis, a minority that follows a 4,000-year-old faith.
Obama accused the Islamic State, which calls Yazidis “devil-worshipers,” of attempting “the systematic destruction of the entire people, which would constitute genocide.”
He also justified possible airstrikes because of the jihadist threat to Washington’s Kurdish allies, following a lightning advance that saw the Sunni extremists move within striking distance of Erbil.
Panic had begun to grip the Kurdish capital after the Islamic State thrust into the Nineveh plains separating their main hub of Mosul and the autonomous territory over the past two days.
“We plan to stand vigilant and take action if they threaten our facilities anywhere in Iraq, including the consulate in Erbil and embassy in Baghdad,” Obama said.
The Kurdish peshmerga, short of ammunition and stretched thin along a huge front, have been forced to retreat with the assaults.
Their withdrawal from Iraq’s Christian heartland on Wednesday and Thursday sparked a mass exodus and spurred Western powers into taking urgent measures.
Obama’s announcement came after an emergency UN Security Council meeting called by France, which also offered to support forces battling the jihadists.
Chaldean patriarch Louis Sako said Iraq’s largest Christian town of Qaraqosh was emptied of its population on Thursday and estimated the number of Christians forced from their homes at 100,000.
A senior US defense official confirmed a mission had started to save those who were still stranded in the mountain by dropping “critical meals and water.”
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