Kurdish and U.S. Military Recaptures Dam in Iraq
August 19, 2014
Yesterday, United States President Barack Obama announced that military operations begun on August 16th in northern Iraq had recaptured a strategically important dam. The dam, located near the city of Mosul, was captured several weeks ago by armed Sunni extremists with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The extremist group ISIS has seized a large amount of territory in northern Iraq and Syria. (World Book map.)
ISIS has come to the fore in 2014, seizing major swaths of land in Syria and Iraq, in their attempt to create a new Islamic empire. Isis seized Mosul in early June. This major city is strategically placed on routes linking Iraq to Turkey and Syria.
Both the U.S. and Iraqi governments were unwilling to allow the dam to stay in the hands of such extremists. The Mosul dam supplies electric power to northern Iraq and water to cities as far south as Baghdad, Iraq’s capital. The dam is also the water source for much of Iraq’s agricultural land. With ISIS in control of the dam, Iraq’s water and power supplies were suddenly in the hands of hostile extremists. In addition, if ISIS had decided to destroy the dam, it would have sent a 60-foot (18-meter) wave of water down the Tigris River that would have inundated the city of Mosul and flooded Baghdad.
President Obama ordered air strikes, coordinated with strikes by the Iraqi air force, on ISIS forces that began on the 16th. These air strikes were in support of Kurdish military, known as peshmerga, fighting on the ground. By the morning of the 18th, the peshmerga had retaken the Mosul dam from ISIS. On the 19th, Isis posted a video online with the statement to the United States, “We will drown all of you in blood.”
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