Obama threatens military strikes against Iraq militants

Barack Obama threatened US military strikes in Iraq yesterday against Sunni Islamist militants who have surged out of the north to menace Baghdad and want to establish their own state in Iraq and Syria.

Iraqi Kurdish forces took advantage of the chaos to take control of the oil hub of Kirkuk as the troops of the Shi’ite-led government abandoned posts, alarming Baghdad’s allies both in the West and in neighbouring Shi’ite regional power Iran.

“I don’t rule out anything because we do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria,” President Obama said when asked whether he was contemplating air strikes.

Officials later stressed that ground troops would not be sent in, however.

Obama said he was looking at “all options” to help Iraq’s leaders, who took full control when the US occupation ended in 2011. “In our consultations with the Iraqis there will be some short-term immediate things that need to be done militarily,” he said.

But he also referred to longstanding US complaints that Shi’ite prime minister Nuri al-Maliki had failed to do enough to heal a sectarian rift that has left many in the big Sunni minority, ousted from power when US troops overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003, nursing grievances and keen for revenge.

US vice-president Joe Biden spoke to Maliki by telephone yesterday. The White House signalled on Wednesday that it was looking to strengthen Iraqi forces rather than meet what one US official said were past Iraqi requests for air strikes.

With voters wary of renewing the costly military entanglements of the past decade, Obama last year stepped back from launching air strikes in Syria, where Sunni militants from the same group — the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) — are also active. Fears of violence spreading may increase pressure for international action, however. The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said international powers “must deal with the situation”.

In Mosul, ISIL staged a parade of American Humvee patrol cars seized from a collapsing Iraqi army in the two days since its fighters drove out of the desert and overran the northern metropolis.

At Baiji, near Kirkuk, insurgents surrounded Iraq’s largest refinery, underscoring the potential threat to the oil industry, and residents near the Syrian border saw them bulldozing tracks through frontier sand berms — giving physical form to the dream of reviving a Muslim caliphate straddling both modern states.

At Mosul, which had a population close to 2 million before recent events forced hundreds of thousands to flee, witnesses saw ISIL fly two helicopters over the parade, apparently the first time the militant group has obtained aircraft in years of waging insurgency on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian frontier.

It was unclear who the pilots were, but Sunnis who served in the forces of Saddam have rallied to the insurgency.

State television showed what it said was aerial footage of Iraqi aircraft firing missiles at insurgent targets in Mosul. The targets could be seen exploding in black clouds.

—Reuters