Email
A month after Barack Obama launched aerial attacks against Islamic State militants in Iraq, the campaign has increased to more than 140 air strikes hitting an expanding range of locations.
The latest targets, made under a lengthening list of objectives, were identified as the US president prepares to widen the bombardment further – including at least nine air strikes over the weekend around the Haditha dam in Anbar province, helping Iraqi government forces capture the facility and clear it of militants by Monday.
The fresh attacks take the number of air strikes to 143 in the month-long campaign and significantly shifts the region under fire beyond northern Iraq to include west Iraq.
When the current campaign began on the 8 August, Obama vowed that he would “not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq”.
Since then its remit has widened well beyond the two specific objectives set out by Obama, of protecting the Kurdish people and US personnel in Irbil, and helping Yazidis who fled Sinjar and other sites in the Ninewa province.
It now involves protecting “critical” Iraqi infrastructure and has included more than 80 strikes against the Mosul dam, which continued last week. It also includes protecting the Haditha dam, 200 miles to the south.
It also includes the broader aim of supporting “Iraqi security forces and Kurdish defence forces” in tacking Isis.
The US defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, said the latest strikes on the Haditha dam were made after a request from Baghdad.
“If that dam would fall into (Islamic State’s) hands or if that dam would be destroyed, the damage that would cause would be very significant and it would put a significant, additional and big risk into the mix in Iraq,” Hagel told reporters during a trip to Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi.
Obama is due to announce a “game plan” for a new offensive against Isis on Wednesday, which could include attacks in neighbouring Syria if the US, can muster international backing. “The next phase is now to start going on some offence,” he told NBC TV.
“We are going to be a part of an international coalition, carrying out air strikes in support of work on the ground by Iraqi troops, Kurdish troops. We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities. We’re going to shrink the territory that they control. And ultimately we’re going to defeat them.”
;