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Two retired four-star U.S. Army Generals heaped scorn Friday on President Barack Obama's authorization of targeted airstrikes in northern Iraq, with one war hero calling it a 'political gesture' calculated to provide the impression that the U.S. is 'doing something' about a humanitarian crisis developing there. 'There's a huge tragedy unfolding: 1.5 million refugees, a couple of hundred thousand just in the last few weeks. 50,000 of this minority group stuck on – up in the mountains,' Gen. Barry McCaffrey said on MSNBC. 'But these are political gestures using military power.' 'We dropped three aircraft loads of water and food...

Aided by U.S. airstrikes, embattled Kurdish forces began to reverse a string of losses on Sunday, expelling Islamic State extremists from two northern Iraqi towns. Makhmour and Gweir, the first areas targeted in the U.S. air campaign that began Friday night, were cleared of the al-Qaeda-inspired militants on Sunday, Kurdish officials said. “It’s thanks to the strikes that we have been able to move forward,” said Mahmood Haji, an official in the Kurdish Interior Ministry. The Kurdish television channel Rudaw showed live footage of security forces advancing in Makhmour, and later crowding around a government building in the town, where...

So said the brilliant Iowahawk this week as most people of the world watch in horror the spectacle of 40,000 members of this beleaguered Iraqi minority huddled without food or water on rocky Sinjar mountaintops. Below them the savages of ISIS kidnap Yazidi women, raping them and selling them into slavery. Heads of children ISIS decapitated are displayed on pikes in public parks and there are reports of distraught families tossing their beloved babies from mountaintops rather than watch them slowly starve to death. This barbarism comes after tens of thousands of Christians were raped, murdered, driven from their ancestral...

On Wednesday evening, moments after finishing a summit meeting with African leaders at the State Department, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff delivered a stark message to President Obama as they rode back to the White House in Mr. Obama’s limousine. The Kurdish capital, Erbil, once an island of pro-American tranquillity, was in the path of rampaging Sunni militants, the chairman, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, told the president. And to the west, the militants had trapped thousands of members of Iraqi minority groups on a barren mountaintop, with dwindling supplies, raising concerns about a potential genocide. With American...

The Islamic militants reportedly expanded their drive near Iraqi Kurdistan Saturday despite two U.S. airstrikes aimed at mortar positions and a seven-vehicle convoy to stop the advance on Kurdish capital of Irbil. The Wall Street Journal reported that the militants appear to have their sights on connecting towns seized along the Kurdish-control territory. The most recent town to be seized was identified as Sheikhan… Kamil Amin, the spokesman for Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry, said hundreds of Yazidi women below the age of 35 are being held in schools in Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. He said the ministry learned of...

WASHINGTON (AP) - For years, Kurdish officials have beseeched the Obama administration to let them buy U.S. weapons. For just as long, the administration has rebuffed America's closest allies in Iraq. U.S. officials insisted they could only sell arms to the government in Baghdad, even after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki broke a written promise to deliver some to the Kurds. Their peaceful, semiautonomous northern region had been the lone success story to come out of the 2003 U.S. invasion. The U.S. has resisted arming the Kurds because Washington's aim is to keep Iraq united. A strong Kurdish army could hasten...

What Do Muslims Plan To Do To Christians? “Beheadings, amputations, gunshots and crucifixions.” That is what one analyst has elucidated recently, writing a very revealing statement describing what ISIS is doing to the Christians in Iraq: If you flee, you leave your home, your possessions, your community and your culture. What little you carry is soon stripped and looted from greedy militia men. You leave with your lives and the clothes on your back. But what if you can’t or don’t leave? What awaits you? Beheadings, amputations, gunshots and crucifixions. Unbending Sharia law including women and girls forced to undergo...

For years, Kurdish officials have beseeched the Obama administration to let them buy U.S. weapons. And for just as long, the administration has rebuffed the Kurds, America’s closest allies in Iraq. U.S. officials insisted they could only sell arms to the government in Baghdad, even after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki broke a written promise to deliver some of them to the Kurds, whose peaceful, semi-autonomous northern region had been the lone success story to come out of the 2003 U.S. invasion. Now, the administration is confronting the consequences of that policy. The Islamic State group, which some American officials have...

Yazidi Member of Iraqi Parliament "Fiyan Dakheel" (of the Kurdistan Alliance) collapses in tears after calling upon Humanity to rescue the Yazidis from Genocide. The Iraqi Parliament came together on 5 August 2014 to discuss the latest developments inside Iraq. (Video at link) Obama has become a mouse that tried to roar and he barely even squeaked, he suffers from a horrid leftist ideological disease which threatens our nation and international order. The West should be fighting ISIS with all we have got, and Obama is not even forming a coalition of states to stop these MSM hidden crimes against...

WASHINGTON - The Iraqi government delivered a planeload of ammunition to Arbil, the capital of Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region, on Friday in an unprecedented act of military cooperation between Kurdish and Iraqi forces, a US official said. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Iraqi security forces, under the command of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite Arab, delivered the mostly small-arms ammunition in a C-130 cargo plane to resupply the Kurdish Peshmerga forces as they fight militants from the Islamic State. The Obama administration is working with the Iraqi government to ensure that additional requests from the Kurdistan...

U.S. airstrikes on Islamic State positions have begun. Fighter jets also bombed Islamic State militants in northwest Iraq on Thursday night. But it's not clear who the pilots were. The Pentagon immediately denied a New York Times report that the U.S. carried out Thursday's strikes. Iraqi military officials told CNN and the Wall Street Journal that the Iraqi Air Force had struck ISIS targets near Erbil, which is the regional capital of Iraqi Kurdistan and host to hundreds of U.S. military advisers. The Iraqi Air Force is poorly equipped, consisting of several Cessna planes carrying American-supplied Hellfire missiles, some American-...

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. fighters dropped bombs on Islamic militants in Iraq Friday, the Pentagon said, carrying out President Barack Obama's promise of military force to counter the advancing militants and confront the threat they pose to Iraqi civilians and Americans still stationed there.

The U.S. gambled on local militias to keep ISIS in check. The president’s authorization of airstrikes is an admission that bet didn’t pay off. Friday morning, with a humanitarian mission already underway, the United States began airstrikes on ISIS in northern Iraq. What had been the U.S. policy—to rely on local forces to contain ISIS while waiting for a new Iraqi government to reach a political solution—is finished. The new policy is still taking shape, but it may eventually lead to more involvement from the special operations troops who have been in Iraq for weeks. President Obama said Thursday night...

Washington (CNN) -- Two U.S. F/A-18 jet fighters bombed artillery batteries of Sunni Islamic extremists in Iraq on Friday, escalating America's military involvement more than two years after President Barack Obama brought home forces from the country. Obama authorized "targeted airstrikes" if needed to protect U.S. personnel from fighters with the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The U.S. military also could use airstrikes to prevent what officials warn could be a genocide of minority groups by the Islamic State fighters. The U.S. aircraft dropped 500-pound laser-guided bombs on a "mobile artillery...

U.S. President Barack Obama authorized air strikes on Iraq to protect Christians and prevent "genocide" of tens of thousands of members of an ancient sect sheltering on a desert mountaintop from Islamic State fighters threatening to exterminate them. The United States began to drop relief supplies to refugees from the ancient Yazidi sect, but there was no sign yet of air strikes, which Obama authorized for the first time since pulling troops out in 2011. ... U.S. oil majors Exxon Mobil and Chevron evacuated expatriate staff from Iraqi Kurdistan on Thursday, industry sources said. Smaller oil companies that operate in...

The Pentagon moved swiftly to shoot down a New York Times report Thursday afternoon that American military forces had bombed at least two places in northern Iraq targeting fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). "Press reports that US has conducted airstrikes in Iraq completely false. No such action taken," Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, wrote on Twitter. President Barack Obama is preparing to make a statement Thursday evening, the Times reported. The White House didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The Times reported, citing Kurdish officials, that U.S. military forces...

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: provide immediate military assistance to the Kurdish Regional Government. The Islamist ISIS terrorists are making serious inroads against our long-time friends and allies, the Kurds. The area controlled by the Kurdish Regional Government has hitherto been an island of peace, stability, and religious toleration in Iraq. For it to remain so, the Kurdish peshmerga require immediate military assistance--munitions and modern weapons--to defend themselves, their people, and (indeed) all of Iraq against this dire threat. We urge the Obama Administration to take immediate steps to meet the military needs of the Kurds, as they battle...

Not Christians or Shi’ites this time, but the Yazidis, whose numbers reach as high as 600,000 in Iraq — and dropping, especially in Sinjar. The sacking of Sinjar has forced the Yazidis to flee to nearby Mount Sinjar to escape brutal execution. What they face on the mountain is a death just as certain, though, and perhaps as torturous: Stranded on a barren mountaintop, thousands of minority Iraqis are faced with a bleak choice: descend and risk slaughter at the hands of the encircled Sunni extremists or sit tight and risk dying of thirst. Humanitarian agencies said Tuesday that between...

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<p>Mosul governor Atheel al-Nujaifi, who fled to the largely autonomous Kurdish region when the Islamic State group and allied Sunni fighters seized Iraq’s second largest city in June, told The Associated Press on Sunday that the towns of Zumar and Sinjar fell after fierce clashes that erupted the day before.</p>