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| Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP |
President Barack Obama listed some of the U.S.’s successes in Iraq so far, in particular that airstrikes on Friday destroyed arms and equipment that ISIS could have used in Iraq and cargo airdrops have supplied food and water to the Yazidi refugees atop Sinjar Mountain. He re-emphasized that “we will not have U.S. combat troops in Iraq. … We learned a lesson from our long and costly incursion” and warned that “ultimately, Iraqis will ensure the safety of Iraq. The United States can’t do it for them.” He also cautioned against hoping for a speedy resolution: “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem in weeks, if that’s what you mean,” he told one journalist. Obama said the airstrikes and humanitarian assistance drops could go on for months, preparing Americans for an extended military presence in the skies there as Iraq’s leaders try to build a new government.
“This is going to be a long-term project.” Two days after emphasizing the limited scope of the mission in a White House address, he pledged that the United States would stand with Iraq if it could form a unified and inclusive government to counter the Sunni militants who threaten its future. “Changing that environment so that the millions of Sunnis who live in these areas feel connected to and well served by a national government, that’s a long-term process,”
Conceding that the advance of the Islamic State (formerly Isis) forces had been swifter than anticipated – details emerged on Saturday of the jihadists opening another front as they crossed into Lebanon from Syria – the president accepted there was no quick fix. At least four US air strikes appear to have slowed the momentum of the jihadists, Kurdish peshmerga forces said on Saturday. Officials in Irbil, including Iraq's former foreign minister Hoshyer Zebari, a Kurd who quit his national post in June, urged Obama to continue the strikes. He described the attacks as "a critical decision for Kurdistan, Iraq, and the entire region ... intended to degrade the terrorists' capabilities and achieve strategic gains. He ruled out ground troops and reiterated administration calls for Iraq to form a "legitimate" government in order to face the threat from Islamic militants.
Aides said that Mr. Obama had not committed to years of continuous airstrikes while Iraqis develop a new government, but that his comments reflected the uncertainty of a military effort that will be re-evaluated in the months ahead.When he announced the airstrikes on Thursday night, Mr. Obama emphasized the immediate goals of protecting Americans in Baghdad and in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq, and helping to rescue the Iraqis trapped by ISIS fighters on the mountain. In his remarks Saturday morning, he focused more on the need to help Iraqis over the long term, giving them what he called space to develop a government that can fight back against militants.
"Under the previous administration, we had turned the country to a sovereign, democratically elected Iraqi government," he said.
"We had offered to leave additional troops," Obama said. "And the Iraqi government, based on its political considerations, in part because Iraqis were tired of a U.S. occupation, declined to provide us those assurances. And on that basis, we left."
"So that entire analysis is bogus and is wrong. But it is frequently peddled around here by folks who oftentimes are trying to defend previous policies that they themselves made," he said. It "presupposes that I would have overridden this sovereign Iraqi government that we had turned the keys back over to."
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| Adam Ferguson, N.Y. Times |
They ran from the sound of the Sunni militants’ guns in the night last weekend. Carrying almost nothing with them, thousands of Yazidis fled miles on foot to their holy sites on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq, then collapsed amid the rocks and low scrub.
Now they face a different danger.
“There is no water, nothing to eat, there is nowhere to sit, there is not even a shadow,” said one refugee, Jalal Shoraf Din.
Suleiman Ilyas Aslan, who fled with his wife and their three children, said makeshift funeral processions into the scrub wasteland on the mountainside have become ever more common. “We couldn’t count them, there were so many,” said Mr. Aslan, who said he looked away when the grieving families walked by.
The Yazidis are a tiny religious minority, following a faith that is neither Muslim nor Christian. That makes them apostates in the eyes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which is sweeping through their villages in northern Iraq.
Some of those who ran to the mountain did not make it, and no one yet has calculated how many were executed by ISIS fighters over the past week. But interviews with a half-dozen Yazidi families who had made their way down from Mount Sinjar found that almost everyone had lost someone in their extended family. Some were killed; others were abducted and faced an unknown fate. Hundreds of women and young girls were taken away as brides for jihadis and given the choice of conversion or death, according to the refugees, several of whom said they had received phone calls from their daughters or sisters, before their cellphone batteries and credit ran out.
Airdrops by the Iraqi government and by the Americans have reached a number of the refugees, but the scale of the mountain, with its many folds and crevasses, means that the refugees are scattered across miles of scrabble wastes.
The atmosphere now on the mountain is one of desperation and exhaustion, said those who were coming off it, dehydrated and confused. Many of those who have made it down have bloodied and blistered feet and can barely speak, not least because of all they have lost.
The Yazidis are caught up in a larger disaster occurring across Iraq, but one that is hitting Kurdistan, once the most stable part of the country, especially hard.
There, a mass migration is underway, precipitated by increasingly widespread fears that the Sunni militants are about to take one village after another across northern Iraq. Some 580,000 refugees have poured into the Kurdistan region, about 200,000 since Monday.
The refugees are fleeing into Syria with the hope of making their way back into Iraq. Others made their way down on their own, relying on their sense of the mountain from years of worshiping on its slopes or in some cases herding sheep and goats there. In some cases, groups of women have come with their children, while their men stayed on the mountain.
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Cross-border strikes between Israel and militants from Gaza resumed after a three-day cease-fire expired.
Video Credit By Christian Roman on Publish Date August 8, 2014. Image CreditHatem Moussa/Associated Press |
As the conflict between Israel and Gaza entered its second month on Saturday, Israel launched more than 30 airstrikes on Gaza, killing five Palestinians, while Gaza militants fired rockets at Israel. An Israeli official tells Reuters that “as long as the shooting goes on,” the country has no plans to send diplomats back to Cairo to negotiate another truce. Since the end of the latest 72-hour ceasefire on Friday, militants have fired more than 65 rockets into Israel. Israel launched airstrikes into Gaza as well on Friday, killing five, including a 10-year-old boy near a mosque in Gaza City.