US mulling airstrikes
The United States yesterday warned a jihadist offensive in northern Iraq could provoke a "humanitarian catastrophe," amid reports that President Barack Obama was considering US military action.
"It is a situation that we are looking at very closely," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, following reports that Obama was talking with military advisors about options for intervention.
Earnest would not confirm the reports that US air strikes are on the table, but said American personnel were studying conditions on the ground in cooperation with Iraqi security forces.
He would not be drawn on the likelihood of strikes, but compared the situation to that in Libya in 2011, when US jets joined Nato allies in a bombing campaign sold as heading off a massacre of civilians.
US media, citing senior White House officials, said Obama was weighing military options for strikes against the jihadists and aid drops to the displaced and besieged civilians.
The UN Security Council was to hold emergency talks on the crisis later yesterday, and France has pledged support for forces "engaged in battle" against the IS radicals.
The group, along with allied Sunni factions, is at war with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's mainly Shia government forces and with the peshmerga forces of the Kurdish autonomous region of the country.
In late June it proclaimed a "caliphate" straddling rebel-held areas of Syria and Iraq and seized the major city of Mosul. In recent days it has seized towns formerly populated by Christians and Yazidis.
Iraqi religious leaders say Islamic State militants have forced 100,000 Iraqi Christians to flee and have occupied churches, removing crosses and destroying manuscripts.
Meanwhile, several thousand Yazidis, members of an ancient pre-Muslim religious minority, are stranded on high ground after being driven out of their home town of Sinjar by IS fighters.
The Yazidi are a closed community that follows an ancient faith rooted in Zoroastrianism and are referred to by jihadists as "devil worshippers".
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