France carried out its first air strike against the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq yesterday, boosting US-led efforts to unite the world against the growing threat posed by the extremists.
More than a decade after Paris famously refused to back the invasion of Iraq, France became the first nation to join the US aerial campaign in the war-torn country.
“This morning at 9:40, our Rafale planes carried out a first strike against a logistics depot of the terrorist organization Daesh [IS],” French President Francois Hollande said in a statement.
Photo: AFP
The statement from his office said the target was in northeastern Iraq, but did not specify exactly where, only adding: “The objective was hit and completely destroyed.”
France, as well as Britain, had already sent aircraft into Iraq’s skies for surveillance missions, but yesterday’s strike was its first offensive operation against the terrorists.
US aircraft have carried out more than 170 strikes since Aug. 8, but US President Barack Obama has been keen to build a broad international coalition.
The bombing campaign was launched to protect Iraqi Kurdistan from advancing extremists and attempt to help the autonomous region’s troops retake the ground they lost.
The US leader has pledged to support Kurdish and Iraqi federal forces by offering air support and arms, as well as targeting intelligence and training.
On Thursday the US Congress backed his plan to arm rebels to take on IS in conjunction with airstrikes Obama has pledged to carry out inside Syria.
“These terrorists thought they could frighten us, or intimidate us, or cause us to shrink from the world,” he said, after a rare moment of bipartisanship in the US House of Representatives.
“But today they’re learning the same hard lesson of petty tyrants and terrorists who have gone before,” Obama added.
As Kurdish and Iraqi federal forces, backed by expanding airstrikes, continued to make slow progress on Iraq’s various frontlines, Baghdad was rocked by a series of bomb attacks.
In a Shiite-dominated district, militants blew up two car bombs and lobbed mortar rounds late on Thursday in what some said was an attempt to target an army intelligence base where senior IS members are held.
Another car bomb killed at least eight people in a busy central neighborhood yesterday, security and medical officials said.
In the city of Kirkuk, further north, another bombing killed eight people and wounded 13.
In Syria, IS fighters were closing in on the country’s third-largest Kurdish town of Ain al-Arab, or Kobane, on the Turkish border, cutting off its Kurdish militia defenders, a monitoring group said.
“IS fighters have seized at least 21 villages around Kobane,” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights head Rami Abdel Rahman said. “The IS is using heavy weaponry, its artillery and tanks.”
The town is one of three Kurdish majority districts where Kurdish nationalists have proclaimed self-rule and its capture would give the extremists control of a long stretch of the Turkish border.
Syria’s exiled opposition National Coalition warned of “the danger of a massacre” in the area, where Kurdish militia have doggedly resisted the extremists.
NOVEMBER ELECTIONS: The KMT urged the CECC to exclude Taiwanese from the arrivals cap, as they would lose their right to vote if they could not return by July 26 The COVID-19-related border control measures and the cap on the number of international arrivals are not being eased, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday as it reported 112 imported cases of the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥), who is CECC spokesperson, said a meeting was held yesterday morning in which the Cabinet decided that current border control measures would remain in place. He said the main considerations were global COVID-19 cases increasing 21 percent last week, imported cases of Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 continuing to be detected
Samsung Electronics Co yesterday commenced mass production of 3-nanometer chips that are more powerful and efficient than predecessors, beating rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to a key milestone in the race to build the most advanced chips in the world. South Korea’s largest company said in a statement that it was beginning with 3-nanometer semiconductors for high-performance and specialized low-power computing applications before expanding to mobile processors. By applying so-called Gate-All-Around transistor architecture, Samsung’s 3-nanometer products reduce power consumption by up to 45 percent and improve performance by 23 percent compared with 5-nanometer chips, it said. Samsung’s push to be first
Hong Kong singer Jacky Cheung (張學友) has been criticized by the “Little Pink” — a term used to describe young, jingoistic Chinese nationalists on the Web — for saying “Hong Kong jia you [加油, an expression of encouragement].” To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule on Friday, China Central Television made a series of programs in which it interviewed Cheung and other celebrities. Cheung, speaking in Cantonese, said in the interview that “Hong Kong has been through a lot in the past 25 years, including ups and downs” and ended with the phrase “Hong
FLASH POINT: The ministry said it was aware of Chinese and Russian warships being detected in waters near the disputed islands and was closely monitoring the situation The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday reaffirmed the nation’s sovereignty claim over the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) after Japan, which controls the islands in the East China Sea, accused Chinese and Russian warships of operating near the disputed islands. “It is an indisputable fact that the Diaoyutai Islands are an inherent part of the territory of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Any unilateral action taken by other parties will not change the fact,” ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou (歐江安) said. Citing the government’s stance in calling on all parties concerned to resolve disputes in a peaceful manner, Ou said the government was aware of
RSS