Iraq fight to take time, Obama says
U.S. airstrikes target militants’ artillery
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Saturday refused to give a time limit on America’s renewed military involvement in Iraq, saying he doesn’t think “we are going to solve this problem in weeks” as the country struggles to form a new government.
“I think this is going to take some time,” he said at the White House before departing for a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard off the Massachusetts coast.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military continued striking Islamic State targets in Iraq on Saturday, with jet fighters and drones conducting four attacks that military officers said were intended to defend refugees trapped by Islamic militants on a mountain ridge near the Syrian border.
In a statement issued late Saturday, the military’s Central Command said U.S. fighters and drones first hit one of two armored personnel carriers that Islamic State fighters were using to fire on civilians in the Sinjar Mountains. In follow-up strikes, U.S. aircraft hit three more Islamic State armored personnel carriers and a truck with weapons, the statement said. All of the aircraft returned safely.
It was the third round of airstrikes against Islamic State forces by the U.S. military since they were authorized by Obama on Thursday.
Obama warned Americans on Saturday that the new campaign to improve security in Iraq requires military and political changes and “is going to be a longterm project.”
In his justification of the United States’ return to fighting in Iraq, he said America
must act now to prevent genocide, protect its diplomats and provide humanitarian aid to refugees.
The president also said Iraqi security forces need to revamp to mount an effective offensive, which requires a government in Baghdad that the Iraqi military and people have confidence in. Obama said Iraq needs a prime minister — an indication that he’s written off the legitimacy of the incumbent, Nouri al-Maliki.
Obama said he will not close the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or the consulate in Irbil, which means some American troops and diplomats will remain on the ground. He said he is obligated as commander in chief to protect U.S. personnel wherever and whenever they are threatened.
But the president repeated that the U.S. will not have combat troops in Iraq again. “We are going to maintain that because we should have learned a lesson from our long and immensely costly incursion into Iraq,” Obama said.
He dismissed the suggestion that the new military action in Iraq might cause him to regret pulling out troops in the first place. He said the departure of U.S. troops was the Iraqi government’s call because it failed to agree to legal immunity for American forces, which was the condition for them to stay.
Obama said that even if U.S. troops had remained, their presence would not have made much of a difference if the Iraqi government had followed the same political course of failing to incorporate the Sunni minority.
“The only difference is we would have a bunch of troops on the ground that would be vulnerable,” Obama said.
“So that entire analysis is bogus and is wrong, but gets frequently peddled around here by folks who oftentimes are trying to defend previous policies that they themselves made,” Obama said.
The U.S. military officially withdrew its combat forces in late 2011 after more than eight years of war. It returned to battle Friday when two F/A18 jets dropped 500-pound bombs on Islamic State fighters outside Irbil.
Gen. Ahmed, the peshmerga spokesman at the Khazer checkpoint on the front line outside Irbil, said it was a “good hit,” but the effect wasn’t yet clear. The Kurdish general spoke on condition that his last name not be used.
Obama was adamant Saturday that U.S. troops can’t take peace to Iraq.
“We can conduct airstrikes, but ultimately there’s not going to be an American military solution to this problem. There’s going to have to be an Iraqi solution that America and other countries and allies support,” he said.
The president said there’s “no doubt” the Islamic State’s advance on Irbil “has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates.” But he said the airstrikes have destroyed the militants’ arms and equipment.
The Pentagon said the militants were using artillery to shell Kurdish forces defending Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region and home to a U.S. Consulate and about three dozen U.S. military trainers.
Al-Maliki waited until Monday to call in aerial reinforcements for Kurdish fighters trying to contain the Islamic State’s advance. It was his government’s first show of cooperation with the Kurdish regional government since Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, fell to the extremists in June.
The militants have expanded north, west and south from their stronghold in Mosul to capture Iraq’s largest hydroelectric dam and reservoir and occupy Sunni-majority towns almost to Baghdad. They now hold large parts of western Iraq and parts of neighboring Syria. Iraqi government forces have prevented the militants from advancing into Shiite-majority areas in the south, while Kurds have defended the north.
PLAN DRAWS CRITICISM
When he announced the airstrikes Thursday night, Obama emphasized the im- mediate goals of protecting Americans in Baghdad and in Irbil, and helping to rescue the Iraqis trapped by Islamic State 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.
But his acknowledgment that the effort in Iraq will take time may not be enough to satisfy Republican critics, many of whom accuse Obama of failing to embrace a sufficiently aggressive air mission aimed at driving the militants out of Iraq and Syria.
U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Obama’s 2008 presidential opponent, said Saturday that Obama’s vision for military operations against militants in Iraq was too narrow. He said the actions ordered by the president we r e not nearly enough to counter a growing threat from “the richest, most powerful terrorist organization in history.”
Speaking by telephone from Vietnam, McCain, one of the president’s sharpest foreign-policy critics, said in an interview that Obama was showing a “fundamental misunderstanding of the threat” presented by the Islamic State that is “deeply disturbing.”
“The stated purpose — stated by the president — is to save American lives, not to stop ISIS, not to change the battlefield, not to stop ISIS from moving equipment farther into Syria to destroy the Free Syrian Army,” McCain said, using an acronym that is used for the Islamic State. “Obviously, the president of the United States does not appreciate this is not just a threat to American troops on the ground or even Iraq or Kurdistan. This is a threat to America.”
McCain said he would favor sending combat air controllers into Iraq to help identify targets for airstrikes. Heavy military equipment should be rushed into Irbil, the senator said. And he said he believed the airstrikes must extend into Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria.
“ISIS has erased the boundary between Iraq and Syria,” McCain said. Yet the president, he said, “has failed so far to even mention Syria.”
MORE SUPPLIES AIRDROPPED
The U.S. military support also has been helping clear the way for aid flights to drop food and water to thousands of starving refugees in the Sinjar area. Central Command announced Saturday night that the military had made the third such drop, delivering another 72 bundles of supplies, including more than 3,800 gallons of water and more than 16,000 meals.
Obama said he spoke to French President Francois Hollande and British Prime Minister David Cameron on Saturday morning about joint humanitarian efforts and that both expressed strong support for his actions.
Cameron’s office said the British Royal Air Force is dropping supplies for the estimated 50,000 to 150,000 people trapped on Mount Sinjar.
U.S., Iraqi and British cargo planes also dropped tons of food, water, tents and other equipment to the refugees Friday. Iraq’s Defense Ministry released a video showing people in the Sinjar mountains rushing to collect food and water as the Iraqi government’s fleet of C-130 cargo planes dropped 20 tons
U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Obama’s 2008 presidential opponent, said Saturday that the actions ordered by the president were not nearly enough to counter a growing threat from “the richest, most powerful terrorist organization in history.”
of aid at a time.
But the help comes too late for many of the religious minorities targeted by the Islamic State group.
A delayed response by the Shiite-led government in Baghdad left Kurdish forces struggling to contain the Sunni extremists’ advances. With nowhere to go but uphill, Kurdish-speaking Yazidi refugees have sought shelter in the mile-high Sinjar mountains, where their ancient religion holds that Noah’s ark came to rest.
At least 56 children have died of dehydration in the mountains, UNICEF’s spokesman in Iraq, Karim Elkorany, said Saturday.
And Juan Mohammed, a local government spokesman in the Syrian city of Qamishli, said that more than 20,000 starving Yazidis are fleeing across the border, braving gunfire through a tenuous “safe passage” that Kurdish peshmerga forces are trying to protect.
“We are doing all we can to bring them to Rojava,” Mohammed said, giving the name used by Kurds to refer to a predominantly Kurdish region in northeastern Syria. “People are dying on the way.”
Some women lost their children along the way because of exhaustion and fear, and at least nine Kurdish fighters were killed while defending the columns of refugees, Mohammed said.
“They are barefoot, tired and left everything behind” in Iraq, Mohammed said. Without significant help soon, those who haven’t crossed yet “will be subjected to genocide.”
The Yazidis follow an ancient religion, with roots in Zoroastrianism, which the Islamic State group considers heretical and has vowed to destroy. The extremist group also considers Shiite Muslims to be apostates and has demanded that Christians convert to Islam, pay a special tax or be killed.
Hundreds of Yazidi women have been seized by the militants, and their families say some were being held in schools in Mosul, said Kamil Amin, the spokesman for Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry.