August 14, 2014
Obama now is expected to approve proposals to open the Pentagon spigot wider, sending new shipments of weapons and equipment as well as potentially hundreds of additional U.S. advisors to help Iraqi and Kurdish units with tactics and potentially to call in airstrikes, officials said.
About 1,000 U.S. advisors and other military personnel already are in Iraq, mostly in Baghdad. Obama said Thursday that most of the 20 or so special forces who had helped assess the conditions faced by Yazidi refugees stranded on a mountain in northern Iraq would leave the country in coming days.
“The situation remains dire for Iraqis subjected to [Islamic State fighters’] terror throughout the country, and this includes minorities like Yazidis and Iraqi Christians,” Obama said on Martha’s Vineyard, where he is on a family vacation. “It also includes Sunnis, Shia and Kurds.”
He emphasized America’s attempts to provide humanitarian relief, but he also said the Pentagon would continue the airstrikes he authorized last week “to protect our people and facilities in Iraq.”
About two dozen airstrikes so far have supported Kurdish forces near Irbil, capital of the semiautonomous Kurdish region, or helped break the militants’ siege of Mt. Sinjar, where the refugees had gathered.
But several senior U.S. officials said airstrikes could be launched closer to Baghdad if the extremist fighters show signs of threatening the capital. Asked about that possibility, Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, did not rule it out.
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In June the militants took Mosul in three days with a few hundred fighters, as an Iraqi security force of 50,000 that fled their positions, according to U.S. officials. The group now controls oil fields and refineries and could have access to as much as $100 million in annual revenue, the officials said.
The militants’ rule in areas controlled by Islamic State has been “brutal but so far effective,” said a U.S. intelligence official. He said they have used beheadings and crucifixions to terrorize the population but those tactics may backfire.
Nearly all the Islamic State leaders spent time in American-run jails during the Iraq war, according to U.S. intelligence officials who briefed reporters on condition they not be identified in discussing internal intelligence assessments.
Some of the militants were held only a few weeks after being picked up in a raid, but others spent years in the detention centers, where they were radicalized and made connections with other militants, the officials said. Yet few drew attention at the time, and U.S. intelligence officials know little about their backgrounds.
The organization’s leader and self-proclaimed caliph uses a pseudonym, Abu Bakr Baghdadi, and U.S. intelligence agencies don't know his real name, the officials said.
Times staff writers Kathleen Hennessey in Edgartown, Mass., and Patrick J. McDonnell in Irbil contributed to this report.
