Obama says Islamist militant siege of Mount Sinjar has broken

Nuri al-Maliki has given up his fight to remain prime minister of Iraq and now supports his replacement, Haider al-Abadi, state television has reported.

Mr Maliki faced immense pressure to step aside for a less polarising figure capable of countering Islamic State militants who are posing the biggest security threat to Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

US President Barack Obama said earlier today the Islamist militant siege of Iraq’s Mount Sinjar had been broken and most of the US military personnel sent to assess the situation will be pulled out of Iraq in the coming days.

Mr Obama, in a briefing to reporters, said he did not expect the United States to have to stage an evacuation of the mountain, where thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority had been trapped by militants, or to continue humanitarian airdrops.

“We broke the ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) siege of Mount Sinjar,” Mr Obama said. “We helped innocent people reach safety and we helped save many innocent lives. Because of these efforts we do not expect there to be an additional operation to evacuate people off the mountain and it’s unlikely that we are going to need to continue humanitarian airdrops on the mountain.”

“The majority of the military personnel who conducted the assessment will be leaving Iraq in the coming days,” he said.

The United States had sent about 130 US military personnel to Arbil to draw up options ranging from creating a safe corridor for the Yazidis to an airlift to rescue them. A team of fewer than 20 US personnel flew to Mount Sinjar to assess the situation.

Mr Obama said the United States would continue airstrikes to protect US facilities in Iraq and called on Iraqis to unite to defeat Islamist insurgents.

Meanwhile, Islamic State militants are massing near the Iraqi town of Qara Tappa, 122km (73 miles) north of Baghdad, security sources and a local official said, in an apparent bid to broaden their front with Kurdish peshmerga fighters.

The Sunni militants have made a dramatic push through the north to a position near Irbil, capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region.

The movement around Qara Tappa suggests they are getting more confident and seeking to grab more territory closer to the capital after stalling in that region.

“The Islamic State is massing its militants near Qara Tappa,” said one of the security sources. “It seems they are going to broaden their front with the Kurdish fighters.”

Islamic State has also been using tunnels built by Saddam Hussein in the 1990s to secretly move fighters, weapons and supplies from strongholds in western Iraq to towns just south of Baghdad.

The group, made up of Iraqis, other Arabs and foreign fighters, has threatened to march on Baghdad, part of its ambition to redraw the map of the Middle East and impose its radical version of Islam.

The governor of Iraq’s Sunni heartland province of Anbar has said he has secured a promise of US support in a battle against the Islamic State, reviving an alliance that helped thwart an earlier Sunni militant threat, from al Qaeda.

Ahmed Khalaf al-Dulaimi told Reuters his request, made in meetings with US diplomats and a senior military officer, included air support against the militants who have a tight grip on large parts of his desert province and northwestern Iraq. Mr Dulaimi said the Americans had promised to help.

“Our first goal is the air support. Their technology capability will offer a lot of intelligence information and monitoring of the desert and many things which we are in need of,” he said in a telephone interview.

“No date was decided but it will be very soon and there will be a presence for the Americans in the western area.” The was no immediate comment from US officials.

After its capture of the northern metropolis of Mosul in June, a swift push by the Islamic State to the borders of the autonomous ethnic Kurdish region alarmed Baghdad and last week drew the first US air strikes on Iraq since the withdrawal of American troops in 2011. US involvement in Anbar is a far more sensitive matter.

The region, sparsely populated and forming much of Iraq's border with Syria, was deeply anti-American during the US occupation. Tribal leaders and local people saw the replacement of fellow Sunni Saddam Hussein by a US-backed leadership dominated by Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority as a threat and took up arms. Al Qaeda fighters flooded in to join them.

US troops have reportedly found fewer trapped civilians on a mountain in northern Iraq than expected, making it "far less likely" that the US will conduct a rescue operation, US defence secretary Chuck Hagel said earlier.

A team of about 20, including US Army special forces, spent 24 hours on Mount Sinjar, where some administration officials had said they thought at least 20,000 people, mainly minority Yazidis, were stranded and at risk of dying from dehydration and hunger after fleeing Islamic State militants.

Instead, the team reported finding about 3,500 to 4,000 Yazidis on the mountain, and that at least 1,500 of them prefer to stay there because they have their animals with them, according to a US official.

The region’s Kurdish militia forces, known as the peshmerga, have been able to provide security, and so the Yazidis who want to remain feel safer, according to the official, who asked to speak anonymously to expand on Mr Hagel’s comments.

"As a result of that assessment, it is far less likely we would undertake any specific rescue mission we had been planning," Mr Hagel told reporters yesterday. The decision not to mount a rescue mission was taken as Mr Hagel flew back to Washington from San Diego.

For more than two hours, he was immersed in a conference call with other administration officials while his Air Force Boeing 747 circled over Tennessee and West Virginia to allow the call to continue uninterrupted by the plane's descent.

‘Significant Role’

Mr Hagel claimed the military actions the US had taken in recent days helped avert a humanitarian disaster that administration officials had warned could amount to genocide. US air drops of humanitarian assistance played a “rather significant role” in sustaining the civilians after they fled their homes and US airstrikes “have pushed Isis back”, Mr Hagel said, referring to the Sunni militant group also call the Islamic State that has threatened to kill the Yazidis as non-believers.

The numbers at risk on the mountain were far fewer “than previously feared” as a result of the air drops, airstrikes on militants, the efforts of Kurdish forces and the “ability of thousands of Yazidis to evacuate from the mountain each night over the last several days”, according to a Pentagon statement issued after Mr Hagel spoke with reporters at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington.

Asked to explain the difference between earlier assessments by administration officials that the refugees numbered in the thousands or even tens of thousands, a US intelligence official said the assessment team found the Yazidi moving around in a large area, with some in hiding.

Because the refugees were not in a confined area, the US reconnaissance satellites and remotely piloted aircraft surveying the area regularly were unable to count them accurately, and analysts consistently had declined to offer high confidence estimates of their numbers, said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss classified matters.

The US troops that went to the mountain returned safely without engaging in combat, Mr Hagel said. They were operating from Irbil in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq.

The team’s findings were a surprise to US officials who were acting on reports from the region of an unfolding humanitarian crisis that bordered on genocide.

The World Health Organisation’s Iraq representative this week said about 50,000 people were at risk on the mountain, while tens of thousands of others had trekked through Syria to the safety of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

In the last several days, more than 60,000 have crossed the Feshkhabour border-point through Syria to re-enter Iraq at Dohuk, according to the WHO.

Bloomberg/Reuters