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U.S. Drops More Food and Water to Aid Iraqi Refugees U.S. Drops More Food and Water to Aid Iraqi Refugees
(about 1 hour later)
WASHINGTON — The United States on Saturday continued its double-barreled efforts to address the crisis in Iraq, as three American military cargo planes, escorted by Navy F-18 fighter jets, dropped more food and water on Sinjar Mountain in northern Iraq to help tens of thousands of refugees stranded under threat from Sunni militants. WASHINGTON — Laying the groundwork for an extended airstrike campaign against Sunni militants in Iraq, President Obama said Saturday that the strikes that began the day before could continue for months as the Iraqis build a new government.
Defense officials said that the airdrops, the second in two days, occurred early Saturday morning. The humanitarian assistance came after a day of military strikes on Friday by Navy warplanes and Predator drones on artillery equipment and fighters with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem in weeks,” Mr. Obama told reporters before leaving for a two-week vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. “This is going to be a long-term project.”
On Saturday, the planes — one C-17 and two C-130s — dropped more than 28,000 meals ready to eat and more than 1,500 gallons of fresh drinking water, the Pentagon said. That brings the number of meals delivered to the refugees to 36,224 in the past two days. The president repeated his insistence that the United States would not send ground combat troops back to Iraq. But he pledged that the United States and other countries would stand with Iraqi leaders against the militants if the leaders build an inclusive government in the months ahead.
Britain joined in the humanitarian effort on Saturday. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said British relief supplies had been “pre-positioned” in the region and Royal Air Force planes would begin airdrops “imminently.” “There will be a continuing drumbeat” of airdrop operations in conjunction with the United States, Mr. Hammond said in a statement on television. Hours before Mr. Obama spoke, Sunni militants in northern Iraq ordered engineers to return to work on the Mosul Dam, the country’s largest, suggesting that the extremists who captured the dam last week after fierce battles with Kurdish forces will use it, at least for now, to provide water and electricity to the areas they control, and not as a weapon.
Britain announced on Friday that it would support the American relief effort there but would avoid military actions.A close ally of the United States in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and in Afghanistan, Britain’s appetite for overseas military deployments has faded. Last year Parliament refused to authorize military action in Syria in response to the use of chemical weapons in the civil war there. Prompted by the seizure of the dam by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, along with the dire circumstances of tens of thousands of civilians stranded in the mountains near Sinjar, in northwestern Iraq, President Obama quickly ordered airdrops of humanitarian aid and airstrikes on militant positions near the Kurdish capital, Erbil.
President Obama announced on Thursday night that he had authorized the humanitarian relief effort, as well as military strikes if necessary, to break the siege on Sinjar Mountain. As ISIS consolidates its control of territory, it has acted brutally, carrying out executions and forcing out minority groups. But it has also displayed an intent to act strategically when it comes to natural resources, highlighted by the call on Saturday for engineers on the dam to get back to work.
The airstrikes were intended to destroy rebel positions around Erbil, the American military said on Friday, and to halt the advance of ISIS militants toward Erbil, which is home to a United States Consulate and thousands of Americans. Its control over the dam, however, also gives the group the ability to create a civilian catastrophe: A break in the fragile dam could unleash a tidal wave over the city of Mosul and cause flooding and countless deaths along the Tigris River south to Baghdad and beyond, experts have said.
The action was the return of the United States to a direct combat role in a country it left in 2011. Warplanes dropped 500-pound laser-guided bombs on a number of targets: a mobile artillery piece that was being towed from a truck and that had begun shelling Erbil, a stationary convoy of seven vehicles and a mortar position. The ISIS order came as residents in Mosul reported that nearly two dozen bodies of ISIS fighters, said to be killed in American airstrikes, arrived at the city’s morgue, while at least 30 wounded fighters were being treated at a hospital.
The military also used a remotely piloted drone to strike another mortar position on Friday afternoon. After the first strike, it said in a statement, ISIS militants “returned to the site moments later” and “were attacked again and successfully eliminated.” In Baghdad, efforts by leaders to name a replacement for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, stalled, with Mr. Maliki clinging to power and rivals unable to decide on an alternative. A session of Parliament scheduled for Sunday — when leaders had been expected to nominate a new prime minister — was postponed until Monday, as some Shiite leaders rushed to Iran, which holds enormous power in Iraq, and Sunni politicians visited Erbil to confer with the Kurds.
Defense officials expressed confidence that they could achieve within a few days one of Mr. Obama’s stated goals: stopping the advance of the militants on Erbil. “Until this moment, nothing has changed,” said Kamal al-Saadi, a member of Parliament from Mr. Maliki’s bloc. “We are sticking with our only candidate, Maliki.”
Less certain was whether the other objectives Mr. Obama had announced — breaking the siege on tens of thousands of refugees stranded on Sinjar Mountain and protecting Americans in Baghdad — could be achieved as quickly, given the instability of Iraq’s internal politics and the difficulty of protecting and eventually evacuating the stranded people.\ Earlier, Mr. Obama had suggested that wider American military support, including an expansion of the airstrikes, could come if Iraqi leaders formed a national unity government with meaningful roles for the country’s two main minority groups, Sunnis and Kurds. Without saying so explicitly, American officials have been quietly working to replace Mr. Maliki because they believe that he is incapable of uniting the country to face the militant threat.
In London, the BBC reported on Saturday that a British cargo plane had taken off from an air base west of London, laden with relief supplies for people fleeing the advance of the Sunni militants in northern Iraq. There was no immediate official confirmation of the news. On Saturday, Mr. Obama said an inclusive Iraqi government would give all Iraqis a reason to believe that they were represented and help give Iraqi military forces a reason to fight back against the militants.
Britain announced Friday that it would support the American relief effort there but would avoid military actions. Britain was a close ally of the United States in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and in Afghanistan, but its appetite for overseas military deployments has faded. Last year Parliament refused to authorize military action in Syria in response to the use of chemical weapons in the civil war there. His announcement prompted immediate criticism from Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who said in an interview by telephone from Vietnam that the president’s vision for the campaign was insufficient to fight “the richest, most powerful terrorist organization in history.”
The leader of ISIS sent a defiant message to the Americans in an audio statement that was posted on YouTube in June and circulated again on Twitter on Friday. The United States continued on Saturday its efforts to address the crisis in Iraq, as three American military cargo planes, escorted by Navy F-18 fighter jets, dropped more food and water on Mount Sinjar to help refugees who fled there under threat from the Sunni militants.
“This is the message of the leader of the faithful,” the leader, known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, wrote in a message addressed to “America, the defender of the cross.” The humanitarian assistance came after a day of military strikes by Navy warplanes and Predator drones on ISIS artillery positions. The planes — one C-17 and two C-130s — dropped more than 28,000 ready-to-eat meals and more than 1,500 gallons of fresh drinking water, the Pentagon said. That brings the number of meals delivered to the refugees to 36,224 in the last two days.
“You should know, you defender of the cross, that getting others to fight on your behalf will not do for you in Syria as it will not do for you in Iraq,” he said. “And soon enough, you will be in direct confrontation — forced to do so, God willing. And the sons of Islam have prepared themselves for this day. So wait, and we will be waiting, too.” In London, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said in a statement on television that Royal Air Force planes would begin humanitarian airdrops in northern Iraq “imminently.”
ISIS fighters had come within 25 miles of Erbil in a rapid advance that took American military planners by surprise. Britain announced Friday that it would support the American relief effort there but would avoid military action. Britain was a close ally of the United States in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and in operations in Afghanistan, but its appetite for overseas military deployments has faded. Last year, Parliament refused to authorize military action in Syria in response to the use of chemical weapons in the civil war there.
Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that ISIS fighters near the mortar positions had been “successfully eliminated,” although he did not say exactly how many had been killed. Another Defense Department official said that the precision of the laser-guided bombs dropped was such that in the case of the strike on the stationary convoy, “you know that vehicle and the people in it don’t exist anymore.” ISIS’s advance northward over the last week appears to be a shift in strategy, as the group had previously announced its intent to march on Baghdad. That was stalled when Shiite militias quickly mobilized to defend the capital.
The Navy fighters launched from the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush, which has been deployed in the Arabian Sea. While ISIS has been the most prominent fighting force of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, its gains could not have come without the support of other Sunni groups, experts say, including fighters aligned with Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, which is not sympathetic to the religious extremism of ISIS but is seen as more intent on taking the fight to Baghdad and trying to topple the central government.
Kurdish officials said the first round of American bombs struck on Friday afternoon in and around Mahmour, a town near Erbil. They reported an airstrike in the same location on Thursday, before Mr. Obama’s announcement; the Pentagon denied that American warplanes had carried out that earlier attack. In a recent statement, the Iraqi Baath Party condemned ISIS’s attacks on the Kurdish region, suggesting emerging fissures in the alliance of Sunni resistance. “We categorically reject the fight against Kurdistan,” the statement said. “Kurdistan and its government were a safe haven to all Iraqis.”
Kurdish fighters, known as pesh merga, have been pressed hard in recent days by the militants, who have seized several towns near Erbil from the Kurds and have taken the Mosul Dam, one of the most important installations in the country. The statement added, “We call on all military brigades to move on Baghdad instead.”
“The airstrikes are being led by the U.S.A., and pesh merga are attacking with Katyusha,” said Halgurd Hekmat, a spokesman for the Kurdish fighters, referring to a type of Russian-made tactical rocket. As ISIS went to work securing the Mosul Dam on Saturday, its fighters appeared to make progress in an battle for control of the Haditha Dam, Iraq’s second largest, which sits on the Euphrates River farther south in Anbar Province. Security forces said militants had destroyed a strategic bridge near the town of Barwana, which government forces had been using to resupply fighting units.
Many members of religious minorities in northern Iraq, including Christians, have fled to Kurdish territory to escape the advancing militants, who have imposed harsh fundamentalist rule in areas they control. Others — including tens of thousands of Yazidis, who follow an ancient faith linked to Zoroastrianism and are stranded in a mountainous area to the west — have been trapped and besieged by the militants. Delivering humanitarian aid to that group is one of the purposes of the American operations in Iraq, Mr. Obama said. Within ISIS-controlled territory, the new American involvement in Iraq has become a rallying cry. With the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who has declared areas under his control in Iraq and Syria a new Islamic caliphate, calling for jihad against the United States, imams have called on citizens to fight the United States.
Turkey, a NATO ally that borders northern Iraq, said on Friday that it, too, would increase humanitarian aid to the region, news agencies reported. One preacher in Falluja, which has been under ISIS control since the end of last year, said at Friday Prayer: “We know there comes a day to fight the United States. We are ready to march towards Erbil and Baghdad. The Islamic State will not be defeated and we are willing to keep pursuing jihad, according to the plans.”
Nikolay Mladenov, the United Nations’ top envoy in Iraq, said airdrops of aid on Friday had reached a fraction of the 100,000 people trapped on Sinjar Mountain. Mr. Mladenov has proposed a humanitarian corridor that would allow civilians to travel from the mountain to a safe zone in a Kurdish-controlled area. Late Friday, the United States military said it had made a second round of airdrops of food and water.
But the civilians are currently trapped between front lines. The fighting would have to stop to open such a corridor, or the warring parties would have to agree to let people pass into safety. Mr. Mladenov said negotiations were underway. “It’s a matter of days,” he said. “It depends on two things. First, how successful the airdrops can be — they’ve been there for a few days; there’s no access to water, food, medicine. Secondly, it depends on the security situation on the ground.”
While Kurds welcomed Mr. Obama’s announcement of American assistance, the reaction in Baghdad was mixed.
“Obama’s speech did not delight Iraqis,” said Hakim al-Zamili, a leader of a main Shiite bloc in Parliament, the Sadr faction, who were among the strongest opponents of American involvement in Iraq. “They are looking out for their own interests, not for ours.”
“They should have provided Iraq with weapons,” Mr. Zamili added, possibly alluding to the United States’ suspension of deliveries of F-16 fighter jets and combat aircraft to Iraq.
Another Shiite leader, Sami al-Askari, who is close to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, said Mr. Obama’s call for airstrikes had come “too late.”
“They should have made this decision when hundreds of Shiites and Sunnis were being killed every day,” Mr. Askari said.
Mr. Askari accused the Obama administration of being interested only in “protecting the Kurdish regional government and Christians, not the rest of Iraq.”
“Iraqis must rely on themselves and their genuine friends, like Iran and Russia, who have supported Iraq in its battle against ISIS,” he said. Russia has sent Sukhoi aircraft to the Iraqi forces, and Iran has trained and financed militia forces and sent advisers.
The decision to announce American air operations on Thursday appeared to reflect a view among American, Kurdish and Iraqi military leaders that a crippling attack by the militants was more imminent than had been widely recognized. The militants’ seizure of two towns within 20 miles of Erbil stoked panic and the beginnings of an exodus of residents to Sulaimaniya, the largest city to the southeast.
Military leaders believed that if the city emptied, it would be more vulnerable to a militant attack, officials said privately, asking not to be quoted because they did not want to shake morale.
The airstrikes appeared to improve the mood in Erbil on Friday, at least temporarily, according to people there. Fewer cars were at the city gates trying to leave, they said.
“The bombing changed the mood of the people,” a pesh merga officer said.