Free Republic

WASHINGTON - The Iraqi government delivered a planeload of ammunition to Arbil, the capital of Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region, on Friday in an unprecedented act of military cooperation between Kurdish and Iraqi forces, a US official said. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Iraqi security forces, under the command of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite Arab, delivered the mostly small-arms ammunition in a C-130 cargo plane to resupply the Kurdish Peshmerga forces as they fight militants from the Islamic State. The Obama administration is working with the Iraqi government to ensure that additional requests from the Kurdistan...

President Barack Obama stepped in front of the cameras on Thursday to utter words he hoped he would never say as commander in chief. "I've therefore authorized targeted airstrikes if necessary to help forces in Iraq," Mr. Obama said in a statement from the White House. "Today America is coming to help." The return to military engagement in Iraq is a reversal for Mr. Obama, whose early opposition to the war that toppled Saddam Hussein, and his promise to end it, fueled his long-shot campaign for the White House.

U.S. President Barack Obama authorized air strikes on Iraq to protect Christians and prevent "genocide" of tens of thousands of members of an ancient sect sheltering on a desert mountaintop from Islamic State fighters threatening to exterminate them. The United States began to drop relief supplies to refugees from the ancient Yazidi sect, but there was no sign yet of air strikes, which Obama authorized for the first time since pulling troops out in 2011. ... U.S. oil majors Exxon Mobil and Chevron evacuated expatriate staff from Iraqi Kurdistan on Thursday, industry sources said. Smaller oil companies that operate in...

President Obama said Thursday that United States military aircraft had dropped food and water to thousands of Iraqis besieged by Islamic militants on a mountaintop in northern Iraq. Speaking from the State Dining Room at the White House, the president said he had directed the United States military forces to conduct targeted airstrikes on the militants if they moved to take Erbil, threatening the American citizens and military personnel there.

United States officials are “closely monitoring” a potential “humanitarian catastrophe” in northern Iraq but will not be sending combat troops back into the country, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday. Earnest said the United States would cooperate with Iraqi military and Kurdish authorities in the volatile region, but he declined to respond to several questions about whether the U.S. would consider any military action to protect refugees fleeing advancing Sunni militants. “I’m not in position to shed light on the president’s thinking” on the subject, Earnest said.

The New York Times seemed to have caught the Pentagon by surprise this evening when it issued a breaking news alert about American forces bombing two targets in Iraq. The Pentagon firmly denied that American forces had begun a bombing campaign. But Pentagon officials said it was possible that allies of the United States, either the Iraqi or Turkish militaries, had conducted the bombing.

Israel is ready to meet any Jordanian request to help fight off Islamist insurgents who have overrun part of neighboring Iraq, an Israeli official said on Friday, although he believed Jordan was capable of defending itself. Asked to elaborate on the statement, Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz said potential Israeli assistance could include sending troops or arms, though he saw that as unlikely. "We have an interest in ensuring that Jordan does not fall to, or be penetrated by, groups like al Qaeda or Hamas or ISIS," he told Reuters. "If, God forbid, there is a need, if such a...

A man suspected in the attacks two years ago on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, which killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans arrived at federal court in Washington, D.C. today, a source told ABC News. Ahmed Abu Khattala was captured in Libya earlier this month. He's expected to be arraigned later today.

Armed U.S. drones are flying over the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, an American official said Friday, primed to defend U.S. troops and diplomats on the ground—or to attack insurgents challenging the Iraqi government if President Barack Obama orders such strikes. “We have the necessary forces not only to protect our own forces, but to be prepared should the President make a decision to do something more,” a senior Pentagon official said Friday. “We’ve got both manned and unmanned over Iraq, and it shouldn’t surprise anybody that some of our drones have armaments.”

The odds are that you think President Obama’s foreign policy is a failure. That’s the scathing consensus forming, with just 36 percent of Americans approving of Obama’s foreign policy in a New York Times/CBS News poll released this week. Foreign policy used to be a source of strength for the president, and now it’s dragging him down — and probably other Democrats with him. Blowing things up is often satisfying, and Obama’s penchant for muddling along instead, with restraint, is hurting him politically. But that’s our weakness more than his. Obama’s foreign policy is far more deft — and less...

For more than eight years, US troops attempted to bring peace and democracy to a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. With the emergence of the Islamist extremist group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), which continues to successfully seize Iraqi weapons, oil refineries and cities, critics are not only pointing fingers at the architects of the Iraq War, but at President Barack Obama, as well. "Sooner or later, honest liberals will have to admit that Obama's Iraq policy has been a disaster," writes Peter Beinart for the Atlantic. "The White House has been so eager to put Iraq in...

A subset of diplomatic facilities similar to the one that came under attack in Benghazi, Libya, suffers from absent, outdated or inconsistent security standards, a Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday determines. The public version of the “sensitive but unclassified” report doesn’t name which 10 high-risk, geographically diverse posts were part of its survey. Among the report’s findings were “some facility types for which standards were lacking or unclear, instances in which the standards were not updated in a timely manner, and inconsistencies within the standards.” For example, “State’s process for updating physical security standards is not timely. In some...

United States officials are not entirely confident they know who is behind the airstrikes being reported against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria forces in western Iraq. From ABC News: According to the U.S. official, the United States has “pretty good information that the Syrians are behind the fighter aircraft bombing in western Al Anbar,” a province in Iraq that includes the Syrian border. The official said the United States is still trying to gather more information that Syria was behind the strikes...A U.S. official also said it was not clear whether the Iraqi government requested or authorized Syrian air...

Iraqi security officials said Wednesday that fighters for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were advancing on the Haditha Dam, the second-largest in Iraq. Worried that the insurgents would reach the dam on the Euphrates River, about 120 miles northwest of Baghdad, army officers told employees to stay inside and to be prepared to open the dam’s floodgates if ordered to do so, an employee said. “This will lead to the flooding of the town and villages and will harm you also,” the dam employee said he told the army officer. This would not be the first time that...

BRUSSELS — Iran is directing surveillance drones over Iraq from an airfield in Baghdad and is secretly supplying Iraq with tons of military equipment, supplies and other assistance, American officials said. Tehran has also deployed an intelligence unit there to intercept communications, the officials said. The secret Iranian programs are part of a broader effort by Tehran to gather intelligence and help Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government in its struggle against Sunni militants with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force, has visited Iraq at least twice to help...

Yes, the Iraq War was a disaster of historic proportions. Yes, seeing its architects return to prime time to smugly slam President Obama while taking no responsibility for their own, far greater, failures is infuriating. But sooner or later, honest liberals will have to admit that Obama’s Iraq policy has been a disaster. Since Obama took office, Iraq watchers - including those within his own administration - have warned that unless the United States pushed hard for inclusive government, the country would slide back into civil war. Yet the White House has been so eager to put Iraq in America’s...

President Obama is lining up ISIS targets in Iraq and may launch an attack on the militant Islamic militia that is threatening Baghdad even if he does not get an agreement with the Iraqi regime, Secretary of State John Kerry said today. Speaking in Baghdad after meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other political leaders, Kerry said Obama is “each day” gaining more certainty of the targets he would strike if the United States decided on its own to take military action. “He has reserved the right to himself, as he should, to make a decision at any...

Sunni fighters seized a border post on the Iraq-Syria frontier, security sources said on Saturday, smashing a line drawn by colonial powers almost a century ago and potentially creating an Islamic Caliphate from the Mediterranean Sea to Iran. The militants, led by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), first moved into the nearby town of al-Qaim on Friday, pushing out security forces, the sources said. Once border guards heard that al-Qaim had fallen, they left their posts and militants moved in, the sources said.

President Barack Obama says Iran can play a constructive role in Iraq if it sends a message that Iraq's government must be inclusive and respect the interests of Sunnis and Kurds. He says that's the same message the United States is sending. But Obama says if Iran comes into the conflict solely as an armed force backing the Shiite-led government, its involvement would probably worsen the situation.

The deteriorating situation in Iraq is giving Congress pause about President Barack Obama’s plan to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. Lawmakers fear that the hard-fought gains in Afghanistan could be wiped out by a resurgent Taleban. Senior Obama administration officials insist Afghanistan is not Iraq. They say the population is far more receptive to a continued US presence, and a top American general says Afghans are better fighters. But the officials could offer no assurances that Afghanistan won’t devolve into chaos after Americans leave, as Iraq has.