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| Doug Mills/The New York Times |
Speaking from the State Dining Room at the White House, President Obama said he had directed U.S. military forces to conduct targeted airstrikes on Islamic militants if they moved to take the city of Erbil. He also said that U.S. military aircraft had dropped food and water to thousands of Iraqis stranded on a mountain in northern Iraq. Mr. Obama also declared that he had run for the presidency in part to end America’s involvement in the Iraq war, and he repeated his promise that the United States would not send ground troops back to that country.
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| Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect, fleeing the violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar west of Mosul, took refuge on Thursday in Dohuk province. Credit Ari Jalal/Reuters |
The crisis gripping Iraq escalated rapidly on Thursday with a re-energized Islamic State in Iraq and Syria storming new towns in the north and seizing a strategic dam as Iraq’s most formidable military force, the Kurdish pesh merga, was routed in the face of the onslaught.
The loss of the Mosul Dam, the largest in Iraq, to the insurgents was the most dramatic consequence of a militant offensive in the north, which has sent tens of thousands of refugees, many from the Yazidi minority, fleeing into a vast mountainous landscape.
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| Thousands of Yazidi and Christian people have fled from Mosul to the Kurdish capitol Erbil, also known as Arbil, after the latest wave of advances from Islamic militants that began on Sunday Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2719203/ |
ISIS forces are threatening to massacre thousands of people trapped in mountains in northern Iraq. "When many thousands of innocent civilians are faced with the prosect of being wiped out, we will take action," he said, earlier saying ISIS's plan for the 40,000 Yazidis constitues an act of genocide.
The Kurds had tried to seize on the chaos. protect their borders and consolidate their autonomy, while staying out of Iraq’s broader civil war. The pesh merga were considered well armed and well motivated, determined to protect their Kurdish enclave in the north.
But the latest fighting has shown that even the pesh merga are not up to the fight with ISIS. Kurdish officials have complained of a lack of ammunition and begged American diplomats for more weapons. But the United States, so far, has held off on significant arms shipments to the Kurds, fearing that it could undermine the central government in Baghdad.
Now, the Kurds have been battling a group of militants from ISIS who are using powerful American weapons they took from the battlefield, left by the Iraqi Army.
“They are literally outgunned by an ISIS that is fighting with hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military equipment seized from the Iraqi Army who abandoned it,” said Ali Khedery, a former American official in Iraq, who over the years has advised five American ambassadors and several American generals.
ISIS has already used Iraq’s water supply as a weapon. Earlier this year it seized control of the Falluja Dam, in Anbar Province, and flooded a vast area that sent thousands of refugees fleeing, submerged hundreds of homes and several schools and interrupted the water supply to southern Iraq.
Ammar Jassim, a 35-year-old resident of Falluja, fled the city earlier this year not because of the fighting but because of the flooding. “We lost everything,” he said. “It was a water invasion.”
If the Mosul Dam were to be damaged, “it would be like a tsunami coming down the Tigris,” said Azzam Alwash, a prominent environmentalist and engineer and the founder of Nature Iraq, a nonprofit group.
[There was] the sense that the country was rapidly coming apart, as ISIS militants swept across northwestern Iraq. The militants, an offshoot of Al Qaeda, view Iraq’s majority Shiite and minority Christians and Yazidis, a Kurdish religious group, as infidels.
As chaos tore through northern Iraq, political intrigue unfolded in Baghdad, with political leaders meeting late into the night in the fortified Green Zone to choose a replacement for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
American officials have worked to engineer his ouster, believing he is incapable of establishing a national unity government acceptable to Iraq’s main minority groups, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. American officials have implied that more military aid would be provided if Iraq’s political class chose a new leader.
As Iraqi leaders, the country’s top religious authorities and top Iranian officials, who wield considerable power within Iraq, pushed for Mr. Maliki’s removal, he was refusing to step aside Thursday night. Even those within his own State of Law bloc were demanding that he leave.
If he were to step down, Mr. Maliki has reportedly demanded immunity from prosecution for himself, his family and his inner circle, and a massive security detail, paid for by the state.
Given the number of enemies he has accrued over his time in power, and the well-documented instances of human rights abuses, torture and extrajudicial killings under his watch — not to mention wide-scale corruption at the highest levels of his government — many believe that Mr. Maliki would be immediately under threat of arrest, or assassination, were he to leave office without guarantees of immunity and protection.
“Maliki knows if he steps down, virtually he is a dead man,” said Mr. Khedery, who was once close to Mr. Maliki himself.