U.S. Launches Air Strikes Against Sunni Militants in Iraq
August 8, 2014
The United States launched air strikes in Iraq today against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a radical Sunni Muslim jihadist group that now control large swathes of Iraq and Syria. The U.S. Department of Defense has confirmed that U.S. aircraft dropped 500-pound (227-kilogram) laser-guided bombs on artillery that was being used against Kurdish forces defending the northern Iraqi city of Arbil. President Barack Obama authorized the air strikes yesterday, but said he would not send U.S. ground troops back into Iraq. In late June, ISIS declared that it was establishing a caliphate on the territories it controls to be known simply as “the Islamic State” and will extend from Aleppo in northern Syria to Diyala province in eastern Iraq.
Yesterday, ISIS captured the city of Qaraqosh in Iraq’s Ninawa province after Kurdish forces withdraw in retreat. As many as 100,000 residents of Ninawa—many of them Christians—fled their homes for the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Qaraqosh—which is largely a Christian city—is 19 miles (30 kilometers) southeast of the city of Mosul, which Isis captured in June. Most Christian families fled Mosul after ISIS gave them an ultimatum to convert, pay a special tax, or face death.
The U.S. Air Force today bombed ISIS artillery outside the Iraqi city of Arbil, which is just east of Mosul. Isis, a radical Sunni jihadist group, is now in control of large swaths of Iraq and Syria. (World Book map)
On August 6, a senior Kurdish official warned that tens of thousands of members of the Yezidi religious minority were trapped without water on a mountain to the west of Mosul. They face slaughter at the hands of Isis militants surrounding them below if they flee, or death by dehydration if they stay. The Sunni Jihadists regard the Yezidis as devil worshipers. The Yezidis fled their homes last weekend during an Isis offensive in which it took control of several towns in the northwest as well as an oil field and Iraq’s largest dam. The United Nations has confirmed that it had received credible reports that 40 Yezidi children had died “as a direct consequence of violence, displacement, and dehydration.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said today that the world needed to wake up to the threat posed by ISIS: Its “campaign of terror against the innocent, including the Yezidi and Christian minorities, and its grotesque targeted acts of violence show all the warning signs of genocide.”
Additional World Book articles:
- Umayyad caliphate
- Iraq War
- Iraq 2012 (a Back in Time article)
- Iraq 2013 (a Back in Time article)
- Syria 2013 (a Back in Time article)
- Syria: The Roots of a Rebellion (a special report)
