• Military

• WMD Menu                           

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Obama: US Mission in Iraq Makes Progress

by VOA News August 14, 2014

With the situation 'greatly improved' for Iraqi refugees who'd been stranded on a mountain in northeast Iraq, President Barack Obama said the United States would scale back efforts there and shift to providing more support for Iraqis battling insurgents of the Islamic State group elsewhere in the country.

Obama said U.S. airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops helped break the grave threat to the refugees.

​​'The situation on the mountain has greatly improved, and Americans should be very proud of their efforts,' the president said in an address from a school cafeteria in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, where he is vacationing with his family.

​​A team of fewer than 20 U.S. military and civilian advisers who'd inspected the area Wednesday informed the president that many of the thousands of Yazidis fleeing Sunni extremists already had left the mountain and that those who remained were in satisfactory condition.

Of an estimated 4,500 people remaining on Sinjar, half are herders who intend to remain, the Associated Press reported earlier Thursday, citing two U.S. officials.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the herders had lived on Sinjar before the siege and were not interested in evacuating.

At the news briefing, Obama said that, given the progress, 'the bulk of military forces will be leaving in the coming days.' He praised U.S. troops for executing airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops 'almost flawlessly.'

But, the president said, 'the situation remains dire' in other Iraqi regions where the insurgents at times have overwhelmed Iraqi and Kurdish militia and terrorized civilians.

'We're going to be working with our international partners' to continue support for Iraqis, he said, again stressing that would be done without the use of ground combat troops.

The president, in his remarks, again called for the Iraqi people to unite to defeat the Islamic State forces.

'We are urging Iraqis to come together to turn the tide' against the Islamic State militant group by supporting the prime minister-designate, Haider al-Abadi, Obama said.

​​Attacks by Sunni militants since June have displaced thousands of minority Iraqi Christians and Yazidis as IS expands its self-declared caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.

Peaceful political transition encouraged

Amid reports that incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is resisting calls to make way for Abadi in Baghdad, the U.S. deputy national security adviser said all Iraqi leaders should respect the peaceful political transition underway.

'There's a new president, there's a new speaker of Parliament and a Shi'ite alliance of different political blocs has put forward Dr. Abadi as a candidate for prime minister, and now the president has asked him to form a government,' Ben Rhodes said at a press briefing. 'So, in our view, he is clearly the prime minister-designate in Iraq.'

Rhodes said 'all Iraqis have to respect' the process. 'Frankly, any efforts to derail that process, any efforts to use violence instead of working peacefully through the political process, would be rejected not just by the United States, but by Iraqis themselves, by the international community.'

Rhodes said there is an enormous opportunity with a new prime minister in place to get a unity government that all Iraq's different factions can support and then turn the focus to where it needs to be, which is combating the threat from IS.

VOA's Victor Beattie contributed to this report, as did the Associated Press and Reuters news services.