WoW ! America to the rescue. US military begin airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq

Less than a day after US president Barack Obama authorized US air strikes on Islamist militants, ISIS, in Iraq, American military jets have launched devastating air raids, killing many ISIS members. This afternoon two F18 war planes attacked ISIS and their vehicles with 500lb laser-guided bombs.

ISIS is said to be the most well equipped and richest terror group in the world after they sized weapons from Iraqi military and also took weapons left behind by the US after they left Iraq in 2011. Some months back, they attacked Iraqi central bank and took $400million in cash. America has also dropped relief supplies to hundreds of thousands of non-Muslim who are trapped in Sinjar mountains after fleeing their homes following deadly attacks by ISIS.

U.S. warplanes bombed Islamist fighters marching on Iraq’s Kurdish capital on Friday after President Barack Obama said
Washington must act to prevent “genocide”. Islamic State fighters, who have beheaded and crucified captives in their drive to eradicate unbelievers, have advanced to within a half hour’s
drive of Arbil, capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region and a hub for U.S. oil companies.

They have also seized control of Iraq’s biggest dam, Kurdish authorities confirmed on Friday, which could allow them to flood cities and cut off vital water and electricity supplies.
The Pentagon said two F/A-18 aircraft from an aircraft carrier in the Gulf had dropped laser-guided 500- pound bombs on the fighters’ artillery and other air
strikes had targeted mortar positions and an Islamic State convoy.

Christians, many of them already refugees who had sought shelter in peshmerga-controlled areas, were
suddenly forced to flee. Tens of thousands of Christians fled on Thursday when the Islamic State overran their hometown, Qaraqosh. Shamil Abu Madian, a 45-year-old Christian, told Reuters he had first quit the city of Mosul when it fell in June. He initially sheltered in a town protected by the peshmerga, but was forced to flee again in panic in the middle of the night when the Kurdish peshmerga troops suddenly vanished.

“We were not able to take anything with us except some clothes in a nylon bag,” he said. ”

People are living on sidewalks, in public gardens, anywhere.” A U.N. humanitarian spokesman said some 200,000 people fleeing the Islamists’ advance had reached the town of Dohuk on the Tigris River in Iraqi Kurdistan and nearby areas of Nineveh province. Tens of thousands had fled further north to the Turkish border, Turkish officials said.

Obama, who brought U.S. troops home from Iraq to fulfil a campaign pledge, insisted he would not commit ground forces and had no intention of letting
the United States

“get dragged into fighting another war in Iraq”.

Questions were quickly raised in Washington about whether selective U.S. attacks on militant positions and humanitarian air drops would be enough to shift the balance on the battlefield against the Islamist forces.

“I completely support humanitarian aid as well as the use of air power,”

Republican Senator Lindsey
Graham tweeted after Obama’s announcement.

“However the actions announced tonight will not turn the tide of battle.”

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WoW ! Obama authorizes limited air strikes against militants in Iraq

President Barack Obama said on Thursday he had authorized U.S. air
strikes to blunt the onslaught of Islamist militants in northern Iraq and began airdrops of supplies to besieged religious minorities to prevent a

“potential act of genocide”

Obama, in his most significant response yet to the crisis, said he approved “targeted” use of air power to protect U.S. personnel if Islamic State militants
advance further toward Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq, or threaten Americans anywhere in the country.

He said air strikes, which would be the first carried out by the U.S. military in Iraq since its withdrawal in 2011, could also be used if necessary in support of Iraqi and Kurdish forces trying to break the Islamists’ siege of a mountaintop where tens of thousands of civilians are trapped.

“Earlier this week, one Iraqi in the area cried to the world, ‘There is no one coming to help’,”

said Obama, who had been reluctant to deepen U.S. military re- engagement in Iraq.

“Well, today America is coming to help.”

In late-night remarks televised from the White House to a war-weary American public, Obama insisted he would not commit ground forces and had no intention of letting the United States

“get dragged into fighting another war in Iraq”

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 Qaeda splinter group. Many Iraqi Christians have also fled for their lives.

“We can act carefully and responsibly to prevent a potential act of genocide,”

said Obama, who described the militants as “barbaric.”

Obama was responding to urgent appeals from Iraqi and Kurdish authorities to help halt Islamic State’s relentless advance across northern Iraq and to deal with the unfolding humanitarian crisis. However, questions were quickly raised in Washington about whether selective U.S. attacks on militant positions and humanitarian airdrops would be enough to shift the balance on the battlefield against the Islamist forces.

“I completely support humanitarian aid as well as the use of air power,”

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted after Obama’s announcement.

“However the actions announced tonight will not turn the tide of battle.”

BLACK FLAG OVER CHECKPOINT

The reason for U.S. alarm was clear.
Reuters photographs on Thursday showed what appeared to be Islamic State fighters controlling a checkpoint at the border area of the Kurdistan, little over 30 minutes’ drive from Arbil, a city of 1.5 million that is headquarters of the Kurdish regional government and many businesses. The fighters had raised the movement’s black flag over the guard post. However, a Kurdish security official denied that the militants were in control of the Khazer checkpoint.

The regional government said its forces were advancing and would

“defeat the terrorists,”

urging people to stay calm.
Obama, who has carefully avoided direct involvement in most other recent Middle Eastern crises, made clear that preventing a humanitarian catastrophe and averting the threat to American lives and interests in Kurdistan were ample justification for the use of U.S. military power. However, seeking to keep some pressure on Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Obama insisted on the need for an Iraqi government that

“represents the legitimate interests of all Iraqis”

in order to reverse the militants’ momentum. With the refugees on the mountaintop desperately short of food, water and medicine, U.S. aircraft began dropping emergency aid in the area shortly before Obama spoke on Thursday.

“When we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States of America cannot turn a blind eye,”

Obama said.

The Defense Department said U.S. planes dropped 72 bundles of supplies, including 8,000 ready-to-eat meals and thousands of gallons of drinking water for threatened civilians near Sinjar. It said the planes flew from several air bases in the region and included one C-17 and two C-130 transport planes escorted by two F/A-18 Hornet fighter planes. They were over the drop area for less than 15 minutes, flying at low altitude.

“We intend to stay vigilant and take action if these terrorist forces threaten our personnel or facilities anywhere in Iraq, including our consulate in Arbil and our embassy in Baghdad,”

Obama said.

He sent in a small number of U.S. military advisers in June to help the Iraqi government’s efforts to fend off the Islamist militant offensive but he was reluctant to take direct military action. He had put the onus on Maliki, a Shi’ite Muslim, to form a more inclusive government to help defuse the crisis. Washington’s calculus appeared to shift after Islamic State, which routed the Iraqi military in the north and seized a broad swath of territory in recent months, made recent gains against Kurdish forces and moved toward Arbil.

The decision on air strikes came after urgent deliberations by a president who won the White House in 2008 on a pledge to disentangle the United States from the long, unpopular Iraq war. Until this week, most of Kurdistan had been protected by its own armed forces, called the peshmerga. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fleeing the Islamists, including Christians, Yazidis and others, have taken refuge in the Kurdish area.

The Islamic State’s Sunni Muslim militants have swept across northwestern Iraq in recent weeks. The Islamic State views as infidels Iraq’s majority Shi’ites and minorities such as Christians and Yazidis, a Kurdish ethno-religious community. Sunni militants captured Iraq’s biggest Christian town, Qaraqosh, prompting many residents to flee in fear that they would be subjected to the same demands they made in other captured areas: leave, convert to Islam or face death.

INTERNATIONAL CONDEMNATION

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was “deeply appalled” by the attacks by Islamic State militants.

The U.N. Security Council condemned the group and called on the international community to support the Iraqi government. French President Francois Hollande’s office said after he spoke by telephone with Kurdistan president Masoud Barzani that Paris was prepared to support forces engaged in the defense of Iraqi Kurdistan. It did not say how. A senior U.S. official said Washington was expediting military assistance to Kurdish peshmerga troops.

Shares in energy companies operating in Iraqi Kurdistan plummeted on news of the sweeping Islamist advance toward oilfields in the region. The militants inflicted a humiliating defeat on Kurdish forces in the weekend sweep, prompting tens of thousands of Yazidis to flee. A Kurdish government security adviser said its forces had staged a tactical withdrawal. The Kurdish Regional Government’s Ministry of Interior said in a statement that

“our victory is close.”

Some of the many thousands trapped on Sinjar mountain have been rescued in the past 24 hours, a spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said, adding that 200,000 had fled the fighting. Many of the displaced urgently need water, food, shelter and medicine, he said before the U.S. airdrops began.

A spokesman for the U.N. agency for children said many on the mountain were suffering from dehydration and at least 40 children had died. Yazidis are regarded by the Islamic State as “devil worshippers” and risk being executed by militants seeking to establish an Islamic empire and redraw the Middle East map. The plight of fleeing Christians prompted Pope Francis to appeal to world leaders to help end what the Vatican called

“the humanitarian tragedy now under way”

in northern Iraq. The Islamic State poses the biggest threat to Iraq’s integrity since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Its fighters and their Sunni allies also control a big chunk of western Iraq.

The group has deepened sectarian tensions, pushing Iraq back to the dark days of the civil war that peaked in 2006-2007 under U.S.-led occupation. The Islamic State’s gains have prompted Maliki to order his air force to help the Kurds, whose reputation as fearsome warriors was called into question by their defeat.

Critics blame Maliki for Iraq’s crisis, accusing him of promoting the interests of fellow Shi’ites at the expense of Sunnis. Heavily armed Sunni tribes support the Islamic State, although they do not share its ideology.

Source : Reuters

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WoW ! Bodies, black boxes handed over from Ukraine crash site

The remains of some of the nearly 300 victims of the Malaysia Airlines plane downed over Ukraine were making their way to the Netherlands on Tuesday as a senior Ukrainian separatist leader handed over the plane’s black boxes to Malaysian experts.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told a news conference on Monday that a train carrying around 200 body bags was on its way to rebel-held Donetsk and then to Kharkiv, which is in Ukrainian government hands, from where the bodies would be taken back to the Netherlands to be identified.

Drowning? Debt $10-$100K
The train left the crash site after the Malaysian prime minister reached agreement with the separatists for recovered bodies to be handed over to authorities in the Netherlands, where the largest number of victims came from.

Early on Tuesday, senior separatist leader Aleksander Borodai handed over the black boxes in the city of Donetsk. “Here they are, the black boxes,” Borodai told a room packed with journalists at the headquarters of his self- proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic as an armed rebel placed the boxes on a desk.

Colonel Mohamed Sakri of the Malaysian National Security Council told the meeting the two black boxes were “in good condition”. The handover of the bodies and black boxes, and reports by international investigators of improved
access to the wreckage of the airliner four days after it was shot down, occurred against calls for broader sanctions against Russia for its support for the rebellion, although Western leaders are struggling to agree on a united response.

Shaken by the deaths of 298 people from across the world, Western governments have threatened Russia
with stiffer penalties for what they say is its backing of pro-Russian militia who, their evidence suggests, shot the plane down. At the United Nations, the Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution demanding those responsible

“be held to account and that all states
cooperate fully with efforts to establish accountability”.

It also demanded that armed groups allow “safe, secure, full and unrestricted access” to the crash site.
“We owe it to the victims and their families to determine what happened and who was responsible,” said Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who traveled to New York to negotiate the U.N. resolution.

Australia lost 28 citizens in the crash.
The Kremlin said in a statement late on Monday that Vladimir Putin spoke to Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on the phone, with both giving a “high assessment of the resolution passed by the U.N. Security Council on the investigation into the catastrophe.”

Meanwhile, European Union foreign ministers were scheduled on Tuesday to discuss further penalties against Russia, but the most they are expected to do is
to speed up implementation of sanctions against individuals, and possibly companies, agreed in principle last week before the plane was brought down.

But Western leaders struggled to come to a united response against Moscow. France came under pressure on Monday from Washington and London over plans to deliver a second helicopter carrier to Russia. Diplomats say more serious sanctions against whole sectors of the Russian economy will depend largely on the line taken by the Dutch, because of the high number of Dutch victims.

“It is clear that Russia must use her influence on the separatists to improve the situation on the ground,” the Dutch prime minister said.

“If in the coming days access to the disaster area remains inadequate, then all political, economic and financial options are on the table against those who are directly or indirectly responsible for that,” said Rutte.

‘WHAT ARE THEY TRYING TO HIDE?’

U.S. President Barack Obama said it was time for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia

“to pivot away from the strategy that they’ve been taking and get serious about trying to resolve hostilities within Ukraine.”

He said Putin and Russia had a direct responsibility to compel separatists to cooperate with the investigation, and that the burden was on Moscow to insist that separatists stop tampering with the probe, he said.

“What are they trying to hide?” Obama said at the White House.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry laid out on Sunday what he called overwhelming evidence of Russian complicity in the shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines plane, and expressed disgust at how the bodies of the victims had been treated at the crash site. But Russia’s Defense Ministry challenged accusations that pro-Russian separatists were responsible for shooting down the airliner and said Ukrainian warplanes had flown close to it.

The ministry also rejected accusations that Russia had supplied the rebels with SA-11 Buk anti-aircraft missile systems – the weapon said by Kiev and the West to have downed the airliner – “or any other weapons”. Putin said in a televised address that the downing of the airliner must not be used for political ends and urged separatists to allow international experts access to the crash site.

RECOVERY EFFORTS

European security monitors said gunmen stopped them inspecting the site when they arrived on Friday, and Ukrainian officials said separatists had tampered with vital evidence, allegations echoed by Obama. But the spokesman for the European security monitors said they had unfettered access on Monday, and three members of Dutch disaster victims identification team arrived at a railway station near the crash site and inspected the storage of the bodies in refrigerated rail cars.

Peter van Vliet, whose team went through the wagons dressed in surgical masks and rubber gloves, said he was impressed by the work the recovery crews had done, given the heat and the scale of the crash site. “I think they did a hell of a job in a hell of a place,” he said. As they went about their work, fighting flared in Donetsk, some 60 km (40 miles) from the site, in a reminder of the dangers the experts face operating in a war zone.

The government in Kiev denied sending the regular army into the center of Donetsk, which pro-Russian separatists captured in April, but said small “self- organized” pro-Ukrainian groups were fighting the rebels in the city. Four people were killed in clashes, health officials said. The rebels’ military commander Igor Strelkov said on his Facebook page up to 12 of his men died in Monday’s fighting.

Donetsk is at the heart of a rebel uprising against rule by Kiev, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has vowed to retake the city as part of what Kiev calls its “anti-terrorist operation” against the separatists. Television images of the rebel-controlled crash site, where the remains of victims had lain decomposing in fields among their personal belongings, have turned initial shock and sorrow after Thursday’s disaster into anger.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said an Australian investigation team was in Kiev but had been unable to travel to the site. He said there had been some improvement with the Ukrainian government offering access.

“But there’s still a hell of a long way to go before anyone could be satisfied with the way that site is being treated,” Abbott said. “It’s more like a garden cleanup than a forensic investigation. This is completely unacceptable.”

Source : Reuters

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WoW ! Obama offers military help to eastern Europe allies worried by Russia

U.S. President Barack Obama
promised on Tuesday to beef up military support for
eastern European members of the NATO alliance who
fear they could be next in the firing line after the
Kremlin’s intervention in Ukraine.
Under attack from critics at home who say his
leadership on the world stage has not been muscular
enough, Obama unveiled plans to spend up to $1
billion in supporting and training the armed forces of
NATO states on Russia’s borders.
The White House also said it would review permanent
troop deployments in Europe in the light of the
Ukraine crisis — though that fell short of a firm
commitment to put troops on the ground that Poland
and some of its neighbors had sought.

Stationing troops permanently in eastern Europe
would be tricky: many NATO members in Western
Europe would baulk at the cost, and a big increase in
U.S. forces could prompt reciprocal steps by Moscow
and spiral into an arms race.

Moments after landing at Warsaw’s Okecie airport at
the start of a four-day visit to Europe, Obama set the
tone by striding into an aircraft hangar to inspect U.S.
fighter jets in Poland for a joint program with the
Polish air force.

“We need to make sure that the collective defense …
is robust, it is ready, it is properly equipped,”

Obama later told a joint news conference with Polish
President Bronislaw Komorowski in Warsaw at the
start of a four-day visit to Europe.

“The United States is proud to bear its share of the
defense of the transatlantic alliance,”

he said after
their talks in Warsaw. “It is the cornerstone of our
security.”
As they met, fighting raged in eastern Ukraine for a
second straight day as Kiev’s army pressed an
offensive against pro-Russian separatists holding the
city of Slaviansk and said it had inflicted losses on the
rebels.

UKRAINE’S INTEGRITY
Obama was to meet Ukraine’s President-elect Petro
Poroshenko in Warsaw on Wednesday and will attend
celebrations in France with Russian President Vladimir
Putin on Friday to mark the 70th anniversary of the
World War Two D-Day landings.

The Kremlin said Putin would hold private meetings
on the sidelines with German Chancellor Angela
Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and British
Prime Minister David Cameron, but the Russian leader
had no plans to meet Obama.

The U.S. leader said he had no interest in threatening
Russia, but that it must respect Ukraine’s sovereignty,
rein in separatist fighters there, and work together
with Poroshenko. If Russia did not, Obama said, more
sanctions have been prepared.
“Mr Putin has a choice to make,” Obama said.

“That’s what I will tell him if I see him publicly. That’s what I
have told him privately.”

Obama said he would offer Poroshenko U.S. support
for the Ukrainian economy to help ensure it can get
through the winter if Moscow turned off gas supplies
in a row over payment.

“I want to hear from him (Poroshenko) what he thinks
would be most helpful,” Obama said.

“We’re going to
spend a lot of time on the economics of Ukraine.”

Washington recognized that Russia had a historic
relationship with Ukraine and had legitimate interests
in what happened along its border, he said.

“But we also believe that the principles of territorial
integrity and sovereignty have to be respected,” he
said.

“We have prepared economic costs on Russia
that can escalate if in fact we continue to see Russia
actively destabilizing one of its neighbors in the way
that we’ve seen of late.”

While Washington proposed enhancing its military
presence on Russia’s western border, on another flank
it stepped back in the face of a resurgent Kremlin.
U.S. forces ceremonially handed over the Manas air
base in former Soviet Kyrgyzstan to the local
authorities after using it for years as a key staging
post for Western military operations in Afghanistan.
The Kyrgyz parliament, seeking to curry favor with
Moscow, had ordered Washington to vacate the base.

HAWK SATISFIED
Poland, which spent much of its history under Russian
domination and is now one of the most hawkish NATO
members, has previously said it wanted a large U.S.
force on its soil as soon as possible.
However, Komorowski said the U.S. pledge on military
support was a good response to the security threats in
the region since Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea
peninsula earlier this year.
“For us it is most important that … there are no
countries that are told by some outside countries,
particularly Russia, whether U.S. forces can or cannot
be stationed there,” Komorowski said.

The military assistance for Europe proposed by the
White House, called the European Reassurance
Initiative, is to include greater U.S. participation in
training and exercises, deploying U.S. military
planners, and more persistent naval deployments in
the Black Sea and Baltic Sea, on Russia’s doorstep.
The White House said in a statement it would help
build the defense capacity of Ukraine and two other
Western-leaning states on Russia’s borders, Georgia
and Moldova. Obama would be seeking the support of
the U.S. Congress for the plan, it said.

“In addition to this initiative, we are reviewing our
force presence in Europe in the light of the new
security challenges on the continent,”
it said.
At a separate meeting in Brussels of NATO states, U.S
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel urged allies to raise
their defense budgets in response to the Ukraine
crisis, something several of them are reluctant to do.
Obama’s visit to Poland coincides with the

“Freedom Day”

anniversary, marking the holding of the
country’s first partially-free elections 25 years ago,
which led to the end of communist rule and the
victory of the Solidarity trade union.
Lech Walesa, the man who led the Solidarity
movement, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Price,
accused Washington of failing to show leadership
today, echoing some of Obama’s critics at home in the
Republican Party.

“The world does not have politically moral leadership
at the moment,”

Walesa said in an interview with
broadcaster CNN. “The world is a very dangerous
place if there is no world leadership… They (the Americans) should finally start acting like a superpower again.”

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WoW ! Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney unexpectedly resigns

United States President Barack
Obama has finally announced Friday
afternoon that he’s accepted the resignation of White
House press secretary Jay Carney.

Josh Earnest, the White House special assistant to
the president and principal deputy press secretary,
will take Carney’s role, Obama said during a
surprise appearance from the commander-in-chief
during a scheduled briefing Friday afternoon.
“His name describes his demeanor,”

Obama said of the incoming press secretary. “Josh is an earnest guy
and you can call him Mr Nice guy.”
Carney, the 49-year-old former Moscow bureau chief
for Time Magazine, told reporters after the
president’s remarks that his last three-and-a-half
years as the White House press secretary has been
an “amazing experience” and “so fulfilling.”

Pres. Obama’s announcement came less than three
hours after he confirmed during a separate press
conference that morning that he had moments
earlier accepted the resignation of Veterans Affairs
Secretary Eric Shinseki in the midst of a high-profile
scandal that’s plagued the VA in recent weeks.

Carney is expected to stay press secretary through
mid-June, and did not immediately disclose the
reasoning behind his departure or his future plans.

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