US jets attacked jihadists who have besieged civilians on an Iraqi mountain for a week, as France and Britain yesterday joined a desperate race to save the stranded people from starvation.
Two days after Washington deployed its air force over Iraq to deliver aid and conduct airstrikes, a coordinated Western aid effort was shaping up to avert what US President Barack Obama warned could be an impending genocide.
An attack by extremist Islamic State (IS) militants, previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, on the Sinjar region a week ago sent thousands — many of them from the Yazidi minority — scurrying to a nearby mountain.
Most have since been stranded on Mount Sinjar in searing summer heat with little food and water.
US forces “successfully [conducted] four airstrikes to defend Yazidi civilians being indiscriminately attacked” near Sinjar, the US military said on Saturday night.
Obama has said he was confident the US airforce could prevent Islamic State fighters “from going up the mountain and slaughtering the people who are there,” but added the next step of creating a safe passage was “logistically complicated.”
US and Iraqi cargo planes have been dropping food and water over Mount Sinjar, a barren 60km ridge that local legend holds as the final resting place of Noah’s Ark.
French Minister of Foreign Affairs Laurent Fabius was on his way to Iraq, where he is due to oversee the first delivery of French aid for displaced people in the Sinjar area.
Britain also chipped in with two planes headed to Iraq with water, tents, tarpaulins and solar lights that can also recharge mobile phones.
Many civilians have been cowering in caves and are scattered across the range.
Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of Iraq’s parliament, said on Saturday that anything short of a mass evacuation was unlikely to save all those who are stranded on the mountain.
At least 20,000 civilians have managed to flee the mountain, but a majority, including the weakest among the displaced, remain trapped.
An alliance of Kurdish fighters from Iraq, Syria and Turkey has escorted Yazidis and members of other minorities to safety, but IS remains largely in control of the area.
At pains to assure war-weary Americans he was not being dragged into a new Iraqi quagmire, Obama put the onus on Iraqi politicians to form an inclusive government and turn the tide on jihadist expansion which has brought Iraq closer to breakup than ever.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also renewed a call “for reason and wisdom to prevail” amid the unrest.
Obama said it would be “very hard to get a unified effort by Iraqis against” the jihadists without a broad-based government that can convince Sunni Iraqis that Islamic State “is not the only game in town.”
Federal Iraqi forces completely folded when Islamic State militants, who already control a large swathe of Syria, swept in from the northeast two months ago, took the second city of Mosul and advanced into much of the country’s Sunni heartland.
The cash-strapped autonomous Kurdish region’s peshmerga force has also struggled and turning Sunni Arabs against the jihadists is seen as the key to rolling back two months of losses.
Obama did not give a timetable for the US military intervention, but said on Saturday that Iraq’s problems would not be solved in weeks.
“This is going to be a long-term project,” he said.
Kurdish and federal officials have welcomed the US strikes as a much-needed morale boost and an opportunity to regroup and plan a joint fightback.
Meanwhile, IS militants have killed at least 500 Yazidis during their offensive in the north, Iraqi Minister of Human Rights Mohammed Shia al-Sudani told Reuters yesterday.
The Sunni militants had also buried alive some of their victims, including women and children and about 300 women were kidnapped as slaves, he said.
“We have striking evidence obtained from Yazidis fleeing Sinjar and some who escaped death, and also crime scene images that show indisputably that the gangs of the Islamic States have executed at least 500 Yazidis after seizing Sinjar,” Sudani said in a telephone interview.
A deadline passed at midday yesterday for 300 Yazidi families to convert to Islam or face death at the hands of the militants. It was not immediately clear whether the Iraqi minister was talking about the fate of those families or others in the conflict.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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