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Kurdish Forces Confront ISIS Fighters as U.S. Airstrikes Continue Kurdish Forces Confront ISIS Fighters as U.S. Airstrikes Continue
(about 7 hours later)
GWER, Iraq — Kurdish forces on Sunday carried out counterattacks against Sunni militants in two crucial border towns, as American aircraft struck the militants in northern Iraq, witnesses and military officials said. GWER, Iraq — With American strikes beginning to show clear effects on the battlefield, Kurdish forces counterattacked Sunni militants in northern Iraq on Sunday, regaining control of two strategic towns with aid from the air.
The American airstrikes, carried out by drones and fighter jets, were intended to protect Kurdish forces near Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, according to a statement by the United States Central Command. The American airstrikes, carried out by drones and fighter jets, were intended to support the Kurdish forces fighting to defend Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, according to a statement by the United States Central Command. They destroyed three military vehicles being used by the militant group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and damaged others, the statement said, adding that the warplanes also destroyed a mortar position.
The strikes hit several armed vehicles of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, destroying three and damaging others. The strikes also destroyed an ISIS mortar position, the statement said. The smoking hulks of three vehicles could be seen here, only three hours after one of the airstrikes, and the dismembered bodies of three men were sprawled near one wreck. Exultant Kurdish fighters, known as pesh merga, identified the bearded remains as ISIS militants. The wreckage of three heavily armed trucks lay twisted and scorched in Gwer, one of the recaptured towns, a few hours after the strikes, and body parts from at least three militant fighters were scattered nearby. Kurdish militiamen, known as pesh merga, confirmed seeing the airstrikes take place, and celebrated Sunday afternoon near the still-smoldering wrecks.
Kurdish officials said they had retaken Gwer earlier on Sunday and were on the verge of seizing Makhmur, where American military planes first struck the positions of ISIS fighters on Friday. The American air support encouraged the Kurdish militiamen to reverse the momentum of the recent fighting and retake Gwer and the other town, Mahmour, both within a half-hour’s drive of Erbil, according to Gen. Helgurd Hikmet, head of the pesh merga’s media office. General Hikmet said some pesh merga fighters had pushed on beyond the two towns, which lie on the frontier between the Arab and Kurdish areas of Iraq.
Both towns are about 20 miles from Erbil, and advances by ISIS fighters there had briefly panicked residents in Erbil. American air power also appeared to be altering the situation at Mount Sinjar, 130 miles to the west, where members of the Yazidi ethnic and religious minority have been driven into rough country by an ISIS dragnet. Four American airstrikes on the extremists surrounding the mountain on Saturday, along with airdrops of food, water and supplies, helped thousands of the Yazidis to escape the siege and make their way on Sunday through Syrian territory to Fishkhabour, an Iraqi border town under Kurdish control.
The American airstrikes seemed to have quickly restored confidence here, with international flights into Erbil resuming after a pause, and business returning to normal. Cheering truckloads of pesh merga fighters cruised the highway between here and Erbil. Tens of thousands more Yazidis remain trapped on the mountain, and American officials cautioned that the limited airstrikes alone could not open a corridor to safety for them. Neither, they said, would the American airstrikes be the decisive factor in the fight to stop ISIS.
American military officials said that four American airstrikes on Saturday hit ISIS positions near Mount Sinjar, where tens of thousands of members of the Yazidi minority had fled to escape the ISIS advance. “This is a focused effort, not a wider air campaign,” said Col. Ed Thomas, spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey. “It’s important to understand that our military objectives are limited in purpose.”
American officials said the strikes were compelled by the militants’ vow to kill the Yazidis, whom the Sunni extremists regard as heretics. President Obama and other American officials have said that more ambitious American support would be predicated on the Iraqi political leadership breaking a monthslong political deadlock and appointing a new prime minister, one who would head a more inclusive government than the Shiite-dominated administration of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and can reach a political settlement with Iraq’s disaffected Sunni population.
At least 500 Yazidis have been killed by ISIS fighters since they seized Sinjar this month, Iraq’s human rights minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, said in an interview. But the political crisis deepened at midnight Sunday as a deadline expired for President Fouad Massoum to choose a nominee for prime minister. Mr. Maliki made a brief appearance on state television and angrily accused Mr. Massoum of violating the constitution by not choosing him. “I will complain to the federal court,” Mr. Maliki said, adding that Mr. Massoum’s inaction “will take Iraq into a dark tunnel.”
A senior Obama administration official said the United States was aware that a small number of Yazidis on the mountain had found a path into Syria. But the official said the number of the displaced who had managed to leave was in the hundreds, only a small fraction of those stranded there. One senior Iraqi official said that Mr. Maliki had also positioned more tanks and extra units of special-forces soldiers loyal to him in the fortified Green Zone of government buildings in Baghdad overnight. The official said Mr. Maliki had “gone out of his mind, and lives on a different planet — he doesn’t appreciate the mess he has created.” A Kurdish news agency reported that presidential guards were “on high alert to protect the presidential palace,” and the capital swirled with rumors about what might happen next.
The official said the United States did not view the corridor into Syria as a significant part of the solution for rescuing the Yazidis, but rather as an “ad hoc” effort made by the refugees themselves. Though the American airstrikes have been narrow in scope, their effects were on clear display Sunday. “For sure, the airstrikes have buoyed the spirits of the fighters and the civilians, and they’re all very happy,” said Dick Naab, a retired American colonel who acts as an informal adviser to the pesh merga. The Pentagon has so far acknowledged only nine airstrikes on ISIS, Mr. Naab said, but “I think there are more,” and the strikes were transforming Kurdish morale and having a discernible effect on the battlefield.
The American military did not help to clear the path into Syria, the official said, noting that the Iraqi and Kurdish forces will have to find a way to escort all of the people off the mountain and relocate them to safety. Pesh merga forces retook Gwer around midday, pushing through the town center and methodically searching for snipers, stragglers and booby traps that ISIS may have left behind. The main threat turned out to be north of the town, on the highway they had just used from Erbil. In three locations a mile apart in an area called Abushita, ISIS fighters had concealed trucks of a type used by the Iraqi army, mounted with heavy machine guns.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, sharply criticized President Obama’s limited military response to ISIS on Sunday, and called on the president to be clearer about the threat the militants pose to the United States. According to pesh merga accounts, when those trucks emerged around 3 p.m. from hiding places in farmhouses and barns near the highway in an apparent attempt to attack the Kurds from the rear, American jet fighter-bombers streaked in and blew up the trucks with cannon fire and bombs. Afterward, one truck lay on its side, completely charred; another sat burned out and mangled near the gate of a farm and the third was blasted to pieces behind an unfinished building.
“With the support of the Air Force of the United States, we are winning now,” said Taha Ahmed, a Kurdish volunteer fighter and an activist with the Kurdish Democratic Party. “For three days, they’ve been destroying ISIS.”
Both Gwer and Mahmour are about 20 miles from Erbil, and advances by the militants last week briefly panicked residents in Erbil, which had been regarded as a safe haven. The American airstrikes seemed to have quickly restored confidence, with international flights into Erbil resuming after a pause, and business returning to normal.
Even so, the State Department announced on Sunday that it had pulled some of its staff from the American consulate in Erbil because of the security situation, relocating the personnel to Basra, in southern Iraq, and to Amman, Jordan. The announcement, part of a broader warning about travel to the country, did not say how many people had been removed from Erbil, but it said that the diplomatic post there remained open.
Mr. Maliki once enjoyed American support, becoming prime minister in 2006 largely because of backing from Washington. He secured a second term after a nine-month stalemate following national elections in 2010, again because the United States decided to support him after failing to find an alternative.
Now, though, his government is buckling under the assault from ISIS, and much of his support among the parties representing Iraq’s Shiite majority has turned away, including some members of his own bloc, State of Law. American officials have been working behind the scenes to oust him. Even so, he has continued to cling to power and seek a new term.
State of Law won the most seats in the national election in April, but not a majority, and opposing Shiite factions have been wrangling since then over whom to back. The parliament has managed to agree on a Sunni, Salim al-Jubouri, to be speaker, and on Mr. Massoum, a Kurd, to be president, but it has not been able to elect a prime minister, the country’s dominant official.
Brett McGurk, the senior State Department official on Iraq policy, posted on Twitter that the United States “fully support President of #Iraq Fuad Masum as guarantor of the Constitution and a PM nominee who can build a national consensus.”
The political machinations in Baghdad mattered little in the north, where the Kurdish region is largely autonomous and the Kurds are fighting ISIS with little if any help from the Iraqi military.
Cheering truckloads of pesh merga fighters cruised the highway between Erbil and the battle front on Sunday, and when word spread in Gwer about the airstrikes here, fighters and civilians gathered, many of them taking celebratory photographs in front of the smoldering trucks.
“Your country has saved the Kurds twice,” said Yassin Mustafa Ahmed, a farmer from Gwer who had fled the militant takeover, referring to the no-fly zone imposed in 1991 and the American invasion in 2003. Mr. Ahmed said he had two sons and two grandsons who were with the pesh merga in Gwer, and two other grandsons and a cousin fighting near the Mosul Dam, which fell to ISIS last week. “Now you have to save us again,” he said.
American military officials were uncomfortable with that view, and cautioned on Sunday that there were no plans to expand the air campaign.
At Mount Sinjar, Pentagon officials said, breaking the siege would require a longer ground campaign by the Yazidis, Kurds and others fighting ISIS, and the airstrikes were only a beginning. Establishing a humanitarian corridor to get the Yazidi civilian refugees to safety could take days or weeks, they said.
ISIS had vowed to exterminate the Yazidis because they practice a religion with pre-Christian and pre-Islamic roots. But reports that 500 of them had been massacred by the extremists were denied by a spokesman for the Iraqi ministry of human rights. The spokesman said that roughly that number of Yazidis had died in the past week, but that the count included fighters who died in combat and civilians who died of exposure or illness on the mountain, as well as some who were murdered by ISIS.
A senior Obama administration official said on Sunday that the escape of some Yazidis through Syria was an “ad hoc” effort by the refugees themselves, and that the American military had not directly helped to clear the way. The official said it was not seen as a significant part of a larger solution for rescuing the Yazidis on the mountain; rather, Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces will have to find a way to get them to safety.
Pentagon officials said that for the moment, there was some physical separation between the Yazidis stranded on the mountain, and the Sunni militants besieging them in the surrounding areas, which worked to American war planners’ advantage. But if the Yazidis start to leave the mountain in larger numbers, they said, it would be harder for pilots and surveillance aircraft to distinguish ISIS fighters from the fleeing Yazidis.
The American air operations in Iraq so far have been much less popular among conservatives in Washington than among the Kurds. “In my opinion we should have an air campaign, not just some airstrikes,” Jay Garner, a retired American general who was in Kurdistan until last Friday pursuing business interests, said in a telephone interview. “It’s pitiful,” he said, referring to the small number of airstrikes so far.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, sharply criticized the limited scale of President Obama’s military response to ISIS on Sunday, and called on the president to be clearer about the threat the militants pose to the United States.
“If he does not go on the offensive against ISIS, ISIL, whatever you guys want to call it, they are coming here,” Mr. Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.” “This is just not about Baghdad. This is just not about Syria. And if we do get attacked, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages.”“If he does not go on the offensive against ISIS, ISIL, whatever you guys want to call it, they are coming here,” Mr. Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.” “This is just not about Baghdad. This is just not about Syria. And if we do get attacked, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages.”
Mr. Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, echoed Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who said on Saturday that Mr. Obama showed a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the threat from the Islamic militants. For their part, Democrats insisted on Sunday, as the president has, that there was no American military solution to the violence in Iraq.
Democrats on the Sunday talk shows insisted that there was no American military solution to the violence in Iraq, which the president also emphasized in a news conference on Saturday.
“In order to put the situation right, we have to begin at the fundamental core, which is leadership in Baghdad, Iraqi leadership, which will work together in a unified way to defend and protect their country and defeat ISIS,” Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.” “Ultimately, this has to be a political strategy that takes place in Baghdad, not in Washington.”“In order to put the situation right, we have to begin at the fundamental core, which is leadership in Baghdad, Iraqi leadership, which will work together in a unified way to defend and protect their country and defeat ISIS,” Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.” “Ultimately, this has to be a political strategy that takes place in Baghdad, not in Washington.”