US Military: Airstrikes 'Won't Stop ISIS'

Clear Imperative For Iraq Humanitarian Mission

Updated: 6:01pm UK, Monday 11 August 2014

By Sam Kiley, Foreign Affairs Editor

Mission creep. Boots-on-the-ground. Targeted airstrikes. Strictly humanitarian mission.

We've heard it all before and it's mostly bunkum.

But, this time, the baloney may have a half decent flavour because lurking in the background may, one might hope, be the flavour of a hard-headed strategic mission.

The latest use of airpower and some special forces troops on the ground is as legitimate as the 2003 invasion of Iraq was unjustified.

Then the allies were duped into attacking a country on a false premise - to rid Saddam Hussein's regime of weapons of mass destruction.

This time there is a clear moral imperative behind those "targeted airstrikes" and the "humanitarian mission".

Not least because the Islamic State, as it now calls itself, poses a clear and present danger to the region and the West.

The rapidity of the response from the US and Europe has been striking.

Within a week or less of the attacks on the Yazidi, Christians and other religious minorities Barak Obama ordered both a humanitarian air drop and his air force into action against IS.

Now the European Union is being pressed by France and Italy to urgently consider what support it can send to the Peshmerga forces of the autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq's north.

Part of the drive for this has been the galvanising effect of the IS's own propaganda.

Its grand guignol of blood-curdling real-life horror - the beheading of children, the alleged burying of Yazidis alive, the endless mobile phone footage of grinning fanatics slicing into the throats of young men held by their hair - has provoked cries of "enough!".

There have been demands that the British parliament be recalled to discuss the UK's role in the operations in Iraq.

Officially entirely "humanitarian" they now include Tornado jets and spy planes to provide intelligence to US special forces and the pershmerga on the ground.

Britain won't be putting troops in, there is no need and the needs, for now, are catered for by the US.

But this does not mean that "mission creep" can be avoided. Indeed some may argue that it is even desirable.

The Islamic State is a self-financing entity. It stole an estimated $400m from Mosul's central bank when it captured the city in June.

It has been selling oil from the fields it controls in Syria - much of it to the regime of Bashar al Assad that it largely avoided fighting as it has focussed on consolidating territory liberated in Syria by other groups.

It has a global Islamist agenda, much like al Qaeda. But its methods have been ruled too extreme by the al Qaeda leadership, notably Ayman al Zawahiri.

It now has many thousands of troops, plenty of captured weaponry, and money to enlist more support.

It is the dangerous new Islamist franchise, eclipsing al Qaeda with its media campaigns and its staggering land grab of a third of Syria and a third of Iraq.

More airstrikes and many more troops will be needed to rescue the Yazidis. Still more will be needed to contain the IS.

If the Yazidis and Christians are ever to return to their homes, then the IS will need to be removed.

That would require a broadened and deepened "humanitarian mission". One that many now believe would be desperately necessary.

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