Displaced Yazidi people who fled Sinjar rest at a border crossing between Iraq and Syria. Photograph: Youssef Boudlal/Reuters
Stephen: Something a little odd seems to be going on as special forces sent in to rescue the ”stranded’ Yazidis discover that the conditions they’re living in are a lot better than expected (whatever ‘that’ means)… so why the ‘targetted’ bombing and PR campaign? Meanwhile, there’s still no new PM in place as the Iraqi political stalemate continues.
By Spencer Ackerman and Nicholas Watt, The Guardian, August 14, 2014- http://tinyurl.com/lyw4zjb
The US and Britain are stepping back from launching a risky military mission to rescue thousands of Iraqis stranded on Mount Sinjar after special forces on the ground found that their condition was better than expected.
Amid signs that the US bombing has succeeded in beating back forces from the Islamic State (Isis), the Pentagon said the planned rescue mission had been ruled out for the moment.
A small complement of special forces and US aid workers landed on Mount Sinjar to assess the situation of the Iraqi Yazidis – who for days have received air drops of food, water and medicine.
Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said late on Wednesday: “An evacuation mission is far less likely.”
The decision to call off the rescue mission came as the White House declared the mission to target Isis positions in the area with four air strikes since Saturday a success. “The president’s decisive decisions in the immediate wake of the crisis kept people alive and broke the siege of the mountain,” a White House official said.
David Cameron said on Wednesday that Britain had planned to join the rescue mission to relieve the “desperate humanitarian” situation on the mountain. RAF Chinook helicopters were deployed to the region to help with the operation.
But Justine Greening, the international development secretary, endorsed the view in Washington that the condition of the refugees was better than expected.
Greening told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4: “It has been difficult to get the exact facts of what is happening on the ground, not least because we have seen people coming on to the mountain whilst at the same time others are able to leave the mountain.
“The US have reported overnight from their surveillance efforts that they think there are now fewer people left on the mountain and that those who are there are perhaps in a better state than we might have feared which is good news. But clearly we need to continue doing the air drops we have been doing – the UK, along with the US. We have now seven, getting vital supplies like water in our case. The US has very much majored on getting food to them.”
But Greening said many people left on the mountain were in “desperate straits”. She said: “When you see the ones that have come off the mountain – 10,000 have gone to a camp just over the border in Syria that the International Rescue Committee are building up – they have walked for 14 miles in searing temperatures of possibly up to 50C. So they are very dehydrated, very malnourished. They need a huge amount of medical attention, so we will continue to work to help the people on the mountain.”
British sources said the US air strikes had been successful in beating back Isis forces. One source said: “Barack Obama is going to do very well out of that. You are going to see advances. Stuff is really beginning to arrive.”
The focus will now switch to the provision of humanitarian aid to the refugees and ammunition to the Kurdish forces fighting Isis. An emergency meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Friday is expected to approve the provision of arms to the Kurds and to agree a greater co-ordination of EU humanitarian relief.
Cameron spoke on Wednesday evening to François Hollande of France, the newly re-elected Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan regional government.
A Downing Street spokesman said of the call with Hollande: “On Iraq, both leaders agreed on the need to help the Kurdistan regional government tackle the threat posed by Isil [Isis], and to scale up the level of humanitarian support. They agreed that the EU could do more to provide aid and that this should be addressed at this Friday’s foreign affairs council.”
In its statement the Pentagon said the team on Mount Sinjar had found a situation less dire than the administration and international organisations had initially thought when the US sent its warplanes back to Iraq for the first time since 2011.
“There are far fewer Yazidis on Mount Sinjar than previously feared,” Kirby said, crediting “the success of the humanitarian air drops, air strikes on [Isis] targets, the efforts of the Peshmerga [Kurdish guerillas] and the ability of thousands of Yazidis to evacuate from the mountain each night over the last several days”.
On Sunday thousands of Yazidis, aided by a Syrian Kurdish group, were said to have crossed into Iraqi Kurdistan, apparently by descending from the north slope of Mount Sinjar and travelling by land through Syria.
US Central Command, responsible for US military operations in the Middle East and south Asia, would not provide any additional detail on Wednesday concerning the special forces’ assessment. It remains unclear how many Yazidis are still on the mountain, and international estimates vary. Some reports had earlier suggested that up to 30,000 people were still there.
Kirby’s statement left unanswered who decided against the evacuation, attributing the decision to “the interagency”, a bureaucratic term for the various US government security agencies, rather than Obama, the defence secretary Chuck Hagel or the army’s General Lloyd Austin, the Central Command chief. Nor did he definitively rule out an evacuation at a later point.
Despite the declarations of the US administration, the United Nations on Wednesday said it considered Iraq in general to be at the highest level of humanitarian crisis. The special representative Nickolay Mladenov said a level-three emergency was in effect triggering additional aid for Iraq.
Since Saturday the US has launched four rounds of air strikes on Isis positions, checkpoints, vehicles and artillery in the vicinity of the mountain and the town of Sinjar at its foot. The most recent was a drone strike occurring at midday on Wednesday eastern time. All the strikes have come to the south, south-east and south-west of Mount Sinjar, with the northern slope – apparently where the Yazidis’ descent has occurred – left unharassed.
The logistical complexity of removing the Yazidis by air appears to be significant. While C-130 cargo planes can land on rugged terrain, the number of civilians atop the mountain would necessitate numerous runs. On Monday a senior US army officer, Lieutenant General William Mayville of the Joint Staff, said the military had yet to finish devising a plan for an evacuation.
File Photo: Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
Iraq PM Nouri al-Maliki Refuses to go as Iraqis Turn to New Leader Haider al-Abadi
From AFP - August 14, 2014 – http://tinyurl.com/p22a7j9
Baghdad, Iraq: An increasingly isolated Nouri al-Maliki again protested his removal as Iraqi prime minister on Wednesday, as his own political party and his former sponsor in Iran publicly endorsed a successor who many in Baghdad hope can halt advancing Sunni jihadists.
Although abandoned by former backers in the United States and Iraq’s Shi’ite political and religious establishment, Maliki pressed his legal claim on power. Premier-designate Haider al-Abadi, meanwhile, held consultations on forming a coalition government that can unite warring factions after eight years that drove Sunnis to revolt over what they say was Maliki’s sectarian bias.
Shi’ite-led government forces and their allies among the ethnic Kurdish militias of northern Iraq were in action on the front lines against the Sunni fighters of the Islamic State as European Union states began to follow the U.S. lead and provide arms directly to the Kurds and step up efforts to help tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the advancing hard-line Islamists.
Maliki has built up a network of commanders in the armed forces and Shi’ite militias who are loyal to him, but there was no sign that he was ready to resort to force against Abadi, a long-time associate in the Islamic Dawa Party.
In his continuing capacity as acting prime minister, Maliki said in a speech on state television that he was waiting for Iraq’s Supreme Court to rule on his complaint that, as leader of the biggest bloc in the parliament elected in April, it was he, not Abadi, whom the president should invite to form a government. A court ruling against Maliki could be a way out of the stand-off.
“The violation that occurred has no value,” Maliki said. “This government is continuing, and will not be changed except after the Federal Court issues its decision.”
In a blow to Maliki, his Dawa Party called on Iraqi politicians to work with Abadi to form a new government.
The United States, during whose occupation Maliki first rose to power, made clear again that it has had enough of him. The White House said it would be glad to see an Abadi government and urged Maliki to let the political process move forward.
Iranian Endorsement
And Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, bound to Tehran’s U.S. adversary by a common interest in curbing the rise of Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq, offered his personal endorsement to Abadi. He very publicly distanced himself in the process from Maliki, who has looked for support from Iran, where he spent years in exile opposing Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein.
“I hope the designation of the new prime minister in Iraq will untie the knot and lead to the establishment of a new government and teach a good lesson to those who aim for sedition in Iraq,” Khamenei said in a statement on his website.
Iranian media carried reports that Khamenei sent an envoy last month to take part in discussions with Shi’ite political and religious leaders to find an alternative to Maliki.
Those leaders, including reclusive top cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, last week rallied around Abadi, who once ran a British engineering company, as a compromise figure who could bring moderate Sunnis into power.
In online statements, Abadi said on Wednesday he had called on the various political blocs to appoint representatives to take part in talks on forming a cabinet. He hoped for a “strong government” that could help the country resolve the “crises and problems it faces on the political and security levels.”
The UN Security Council urged Abadi “to work swiftly” to form an inclusive government and called on all political parties and their supporters “to remain calm and respect the political process.”
Violence in Baghdad
There was more bloodshed in Baghdad, where at least 12 people were killed by bombs in two mainly Shi’ite areas.
Violence also was reported along the 1,000-km (600-mile) front established by the Islamic State, which exploited the political stalemate in Baghdad to burst beyond strongholds in Syria to claim a cross-border caliphate occupying up to a third of Iraq.
Kurdish Peshmerga militia sources said their forces clashed with IS fighters in Diyala, northeast of Baghdad. In the provincial capital, Baquba, five Sunni Muslims were killed when Shi’ite gunmen shot them as they prayed in a mosque.
Government forces, which collapsed in the face of the Islamic State in June, fought alongside Shi’ite volunteers around the Sunni city of Tikrit, north of the capital, and residents also reported skirmishes in the western cities of Ramadi and Falluja.
With ethnic Kurdish Peshmerga forces pushed back on the defensive by the Islamic State this month, France announced it was joining the United States in urgently supplying what it called “sophisticated arms” to the autonomous regional force, and EU foreign ministers agreed to break summer holidays to discuss the crisis on Friday.
A US official said talks were also under way with Arab countries to supply munitions to the Kurds.
Germany said it would send non-lethal military equipment to Kurdish fighters this weekend, and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Berlin was prepared to bend its restrictive policies on weapons exports and send arms to the Kurds.
In addition to arming the Peshmerga and, in the case of Washington, bombing militant positions, Western powers have been trying to help aid agencies drop supplies and provide refuge for tens of thousands of people, many of them from non-Sunni communities, who have fled attacks by the Islamic State.
The White House said the United States and its allies were considering setting up airlifts and safe land corridors to rescue people, including many from the Yazidi sect stranded on the arid heights of Mount Sinjar near the Syrian border.
But a US assessment team sent to Mount Sinjar on Wednesday found the situation better than expected, and the Pentagon said an evacuation mission was “far less likely.”
The US team found fewer civilians than expected and their condition was better than previously believed, the Pentagon said, crediting humanitarian air drops, US air strikes on Islamic State targets and the ability of Yazidis to evacuate the mountain in recent nights.
The US military, which has been hitting Islamic State targets since Friday in support of the trapped Yazidis, said a drone strike destroyed an armed truck near the village of Sinjar on Wednesday.
The White House said that while President Barack Obama has ruled out sending back combat troops to Iraq it could not rule out ground troops being used in a humanitarian role, a sign that Western powers could be drawn back into the region despite public reluctance to repeat the experience of the last decade.