US president Barack Obama yesterday threatened military strikes in Iraq 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 Shia-led government abandoned posts, alarming Baghdad’s allies both in the West and in neighbouring Shia 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,” Mr Obama said when asked whether he was contemplating air strikes. Officials later stressed that ground troops would not be sent in, however.
Mr Obama said he was looking at “all options” to help Iraq’s leaders. “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 Shia 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.
Strengthen forces
US vice-president Joe Biden spoke to Mr 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 requests for air strikes.
With voters wary of renewing the costly military entanglements of the past decade, Mr Obama last year stepped back from launching air strikes in Syria, where Sunni militants from the same group – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) – also referred to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – 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 Isis 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.
Potential threat
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.
At Mosul, which had a population close to two million before recent events forced hundreds of thousands to flee, witnesses saw Isis 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. Further south, the fighters extended their lightning advance to towns only about an hour’s drive from the capital, where Shia militia are mobilising for a potential replay of the ethnic and sectarian bloodbath of 2006-2007.
Trucks carrying Shia volunteers in uniform rumbled towards the front lines to defend Baghdad.
The forces of Iraq’s autonomous ethnic Kurdish north, known as the peshmerga, took over bases in Kirkuk vacated by the army, a spokesman said: “The whole of Kirkuk has fallen into the hands of peshmerga,” said peshmerga spokesman Jabbar Yawar. “No Iraqi army remains in Kirkuk now.”
Kurds have long dreamed of taking Kirkuk and its huge oil reserves. They regard the city, just outside their autonomous region, as their historic capital, and peshmerga units were already present in an uneasy balance with government forces.
The swift move by their highly organised security forces to seize full control demonstrates how this week’s sudden advance by Isis has redrawn Iraq’s map – and potentially that of the entire Middle East, where national borders were set nearly a century ago as France and Britain carved up the Ottoman empire.
Since Tuesday, black-clad Isis fighters who do not recognise the region’s modern frontiers have seized Mosul and Tikrit, Saddam’s home town, and other towns and cities north of Baghdad.
The army has evaporated in the face of the onslaught, abandoning bases and US-provided weapons. Online videos showed purportedly a column of hundreds, possibly thousands, of troops without uniforms being marched under guard near Tikrit.
Call for weapons
The UN Security Council was expected to meet last night. Iraq’s ambassador to France said it would call for weapons and air support: “We need equipment, extra aviation and drones,” Fareed Yasseen said on French radio.
The council “must support Iraq, because what is happening is not just a threat for Iraq but the entire region”.
Militants have set up military councils to run the towns they captured, residents said. “They came in hundreds to my town and said they are not here for blood or revenge but they seek reforms and to impose justice. They picked a retired general to run the town,” said a tribal figure from the town of Alam.
“ ‘Our final destination will be Baghdad, the decisive battle will be there,’ – that’s what their leader kept repeating,” he said.
Security was stepped up in Baghdad to prevent the Sunni militants from reaching the capital, which is itself divided into Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods and saw ferocious sectarian street fighting in 2006-2007 under US occupation.
Iraq’s parliament was meant to hold an extraordinary session yesterday to vote on declaring a state of emergency, but failed to reach a quorum.