WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Thursday he had authorized “targeted” U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State fighters in northern Iraq and military airdrops of humanitarian supplies to besieged religious minorities there to prevent a “potential act of genocide.”
Speaking after meetings with his national security team, Obama — in his most significant response to the Iraq crisis — said he approved limited use of American air power to protect American personnel if Islamic State militants advance toward the Kurdish capital Arbil where they are based.
The airstrikes would be the first carried out by the U.S. military in Iraq since the withdrawal of its forces at the end of 2011, but Obama insisted he would not commit any ground forces and had no intention of letting the United States get dragged back into a war there.
Obama took action amid international fears of a humanitarian catastrophe engulfing tens of thousands of members of Iraq’s minority Yazidi sect driven out of their homes and stranded on Sinjar mountain under threat from rampaging militants of Islamic State, an al-Qaida splinter group. Many Iraqi Christians also have fled for their lives.
“We can act carefully and responsibly to prevent a potential act of genocide,” Obama told reporters at the White House. “I’ve therefore authorized targeted airstrikes if necessary.”
U.S. government sources said the United States would be flying surveillance drones out of the Kurdish capital Arbil as part of a mission to assess the Islamic State threat and the capability of Iraqi and Kurdish forces to confront it.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters earlier Thursday that Obama had made clear in the past that any U.S. military action would be “very limited in scope,” would not involve putting troops on the ground, and should be closely tied to Iraqi political reforms, which Washington has demanded.
“We’re working intensively with the government of Iraq — the Iraqi security forces and the Kurdish authorities in the immediate area to support their efforts to address the humanitarian situation in Sinjar,” Earnest said.
The Islamic State’s Sunni militants, an offshoot of al-Qaida who have swept across northwestern Iraq in recent weeks, have come within a 30-minute drive of Arbil. The Islamic State views as infidels Iraq’s majority Shiites and minorities such as Christians and Yazidis, a Kurdish ethno-religious community.
Near the White House on Thursday, some 80 people protested for hours on behalf of the Yazidis, shaking U.S. flags, chanting slogans and holding up signs condemning what they called a holocaust of Christian communities in Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State.
Some of the many thousands trapped on Sinjar mountain were rescued Thursday, a spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said earlier, adding that 200,000 had fled the fighting.
Earnest said the responsibility for the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, including that on Sinjar mountain, lay with the Iraqi leaders who had failed to create a united government to address the interests of the country’s Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
The Islamist fighters, who have killed many thousands and declared a caliphate in the Iraqi area they conquered, are now threatening Kurdistan, previously considered a bastion of stability in a country ravaged by conflict.
Bernadette Meehan, spokeswoman for Obama’s National Security Council, told Reuters on Wednesday that any provision of U.S. weapons to the Kurds “must be coordinated with central government authorities, in Iraq and elsewhere.”
But she added that given the threat from the Islamic State, “the United States will continue to engage with Baghdad and Arbil to enhance cooperation on the security front and other issues.”