U.S.-led strikes continue as coalition grows
DEVELOPMENTS
• The vote by the British Parliament on Friday to join in the U.S.-led air campaign in Iraq represented a significant turnaround from last year, when the lawmakers voted against joining U.S.-proposed strikes on Syria for its use of chemical weapons. Seeking political consensus. Prime Minister David Cameron limited the new proposal to air strikes in Iraq, though he said there was no legal barrier to hitting targets in Syria, as well.
• European counterterrorism specialists say their American counterparts never mentioned an imminent plot by al-Qaida operatives in Syria to attack Western targets and didn’t brief them on the group that’s supposedly behind the plan, a previously unknown terrorist unit that American officials have dubbed the Khorasan group. U.S. officials said the Khorasan group was composed of senior al-Qaida operatives who had been dispatched to Syria to plot attacks against the West. The officials said the strikes were intended to break up a plan for an imminent attack. The White House declined Friday to expand on that description or say with whom the intelligence about the group had been shared.
• Spanish and Moroccan law enforcement officials have arrested nine people suspected of being part of a terrorist cell linked to the Islamic State, the Spanish Interior Ministry said Friday. The ministry said the suspects had been arrested in Melilla, a Spanish-administered enclave on the north coast of Africa, and Nador in northeastern Morocco. The Spanish media said that those arrested included eight Moroccan nationals and one Spaniard, who was purportedly the leader of the group. Also Friday, the British police arrested two men suspected of plotting terrorist acts, a day after nine others were rounded up on suspicion of belonging to a banned Islamic extremist group.
• The head of France’s largest mosque called for Muslims to rally Friday in Paris to condemn the videotaped beheading of a French mountaineer by militants linked to the Islamic State group and show unity against terrorism, saying Islamic State’s “deadly ideology” had nothing to do with Islam.
The European countries committed to take part only in attacks on radicals in Iraq, leaving the operation in Syria to the United States and five Arab allies who began conducting airstrikes there on Tuesday. Still, the broadening of the coalition provides a welcome boost for President Barack Obama and the American-led campaign.
The U.S.-led operation aims to roll back and ultimately crush the Islamic State group, which has carved out a proto-state stretching from Syria’s northern border with Turkey to the outskirts of Baghdad.
While striking fear into its opponents, the Islamic State group’s tactics — including beheadings and persecution of religious minorities — have also helped galvanize the international community to move against the extremists. France has already joined the U.S.-led effort in Iraq, and is considering expanding its role to Syria as well. The Netherlands, too, has said it would take part in the bombing campaign in Iraq.
Denmark, Belgium and Britain all signed on Friday. Denmark said it would send seven F-16 fighter jets and 250 pilots and support staff, while Belgium will contribute six F-16s. The planes could go into action as early as today
“No one should be ducking in this case,” said Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt. “Everyone should contribute.”
British lawmakers, urged on by Prime Minister David Cameron, voted Friday to join the coalition. London is expected to deploy Tornado fighters, which are currently based in Cyprus, within striking distance of northern Iraq. The planes have already been flying surveillance missions over Iraq.
“This is about psychopathic terrorists that are trying to kill us and we do have to realize that, whether we like it or not, they have already declared war on us,” Cameron told a tense House of Commons in a more than six-hour debate. “There isn’t a ‘walk on by’ option. There isn’t an option of just hoping this will go away.”
The European contingent will join a campaign has already carried out hundreds of airstrikes, the latest of which hit Islamic State positions in both Iraq and Syria late Thursday and Friday.
The U.S. Central Command said that airstrikes outside the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk destroyed three Islamic State Humvees, disabled two armed vehicles and damaged an armored truck. More strikes west of Baghdad and near the Syrian border knocked out a guard shack, armed vehicles, a bunker and a checkpoint.
In Syria, the U.S. destroyed four tanks and damaged another outside the city of Deir el-Zour on the Euphrates River.
Those strikes marked the second consecutive day that the United States and its Arab allies have taken aim at the militants near the border with Iraq. Coalition planes pounded a dozen makeshift oil-producing facilities in the same area on Thursday, trying to cripple one of the militants’ primary sources of cash.
Syrian activists said the American-led air campaign also hit two other oil fields on Friday ando targeted the headquarters of the Islamic State group in the town of Mayadeen.
The U.S. did not have any information on strikes targeting oil facilities, but the military statement only described raids by American forces — not those by other coalition partners.
In Washington, the top U.S. military officer said the United States and its allies are taking every precaution to limit civilian casualties.
“Of course you know you can’t reduce it to zero,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon news conference. He said he had received no reports of civilian casualties so far, though the British-based Observatory for Human Rights said there have been 13.
