The US will not be sending more troops into combat in Iraq to deal with Islamic militants, but will explore "a range of other options", Barack Obama has said.
Addressing the media on the White House lawn, the US president said the White House would pursue diplomatic solutions in Iraq and the surrounding region.
He was reacting after an al-Qaeda-inspired group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, captured a series of northern cities and threatened to press forward to Baghdad.
Iraq has faced resurgent violence since the US military withdrew in late 2011. A sharp burst of violence this week led to the evacuation of Americans from a major air base in northern Iraq where the US had been training security forces.
“We do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold,” Mr Obama said yesterday in the Oval Office.
Republican politicians pinned some of the blame for the escalating violence on Mr Obama’s reluctance to re-engage in a conflict he long opposed.
For more than a year, the Iraqi government has been pleading with the US for additional help to combat the insurgency, which has been fuelled by the civil war in neighbouring Syria. Northern Iraq has become a way station for insurgents who routinely travel between the two countries and are spreading the Syrian war’s violence.
Iraqi leaders made a fresh request earlier this week, asking for a mix of drones and manned aircraft that could be used for surveillance and active missions.
The US is already flying unmanned aircraft over Iraq for intelligence purposes, an official said.
Nearly all American troops left Iraq in December 2011 after Washington and Baghdad failed to negotiate a security agreement that would have kept a limited number of US forces in the country for a few more years.
Hundreds killed
Hundreds of people were killed, many of them summarily executed, after Sunni Islamist militants overran the Iraqi city of Mosul this week, UN human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said today.
Iraqi government forces had stopped people at checkpoints and prevented them fleeing Mosul as ISIL militants took it over, he said. Now ISIL was using its own checkpoints to hunt down anyone associated with the Iraqi government.
“The full extent of civilian casualties is not yet known but reports received by UNAMI, the UN mission in Iraq, to this point suggest that the number of people killed in recent days may run into the hundreds and the number of wounded is said to be approaching 1,000,” he told a news briefing in Geneva.
UNAMI has its own network of contacts and had interviewed some of the 500,000 who fled Mosul, he said. A further 40,000 people were estimated to have fled from Tikrit and Samara, according to the International Organization for Migration.
“We’ve received reports of the summary execution of Iraqi army soldiers during the capture of Mosul and of 17 civilians in one particular street in Mosul city on June 11,” Mr Colville said.
“There was also the execution of a court employee in the Dawasa area in central Mosul and the execution of 12 people in Dawasa who were believed to have been serving with the Iraq security services or possibly with members of the police.”
The “great majority” of the militants were Iraqis, Mr Colville said, citing UNAMI reports.
Prisoners released by the militants from Mosul prison had been looking to exact revenge on those responsible for their incarceration and some went to Tikrit and killed seven former prison officers there, Mr Colville said.
“We’ve also had reports suggesting that government forces have also committed excesses, in particular the shelling of civilian areas on 6th and 8th June in Mosul, resulting in a large number of civilian casualties,” he said.
“There are claims that up to 30 civilians may have been killed during this shelling,” he said.
“We also received reports that government forces were at one point not allowing people to leave from Mosul as they tried to do so and people were actually being turned back from checkpoints on the outskirts of the city.”
Agencies