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US 'sending arms directly' to Kurds

No plans to expand Iraq strikes: Pentagon

Agencies
The US government is directly supplying weapons to Kurdish fighters to help them fight Sunni militants, in a deepening of America's military involvement in Iraq, US government sources said yesterday.
The supply of weapons to Iraqi Kurdistan comes as Kurdish fighters struggle to stem advances by militants from the Islamic State, an al-Qaeda offshoot.
The sources said the weapons were supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency but that the Department of Defence may soon start arming the Kurdish fighters, who regained control of two strategic towns in northern Iraq on Sunday with help from US airstrikes.
The officials declined to specify when the supply program began or what sort of arms it included.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon said the United States has no plans to expand its air campaign in Iraq beyond protecting American personnel in the city of Arbil and besieged Yazidi refugees.
"There are no plans to expand the current air campaign beyond the
current self defense activities," Lieutenant General William Mayville told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday.
Last week, US warplanes launched strikes to beat back extremist fighters from the so-called Islamic State who had threatened to massacre the Yazidi religious minority and attack Arbil.
Arbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, hosts a US consulate and other facilities, and President Barack Obama said he had ordered air strikes to protect American lives.
US planes joined Iraqi forces in attempting to bring aid to thousands of Yazidis trapped on an exposed mountain and under attack by the IS militants who had driven them from their homes.
The sight of US jets and drones in action over Iraq again, less than three years after American forces withdrew
from the country, has raised fears that Washington is once again being dragged into war.
But Mayville insisted that there had been no mission creep.
The US officials said weapons have also been shipped in three deliveries from the Iraqi government in Baghdad to Arbil, consisting mostly of AK-47 assault rifles and ammunition, Reuters was first to report on Friday that the Iraqi government had sent a first, unprecedented shipment of ammunition to Arbil.
The United States has long insisted that all sales of US weapons must go through Iraq's central government, despite Kurdish complaints that Baghdad had deprived them of promised military equipment and financial support.
Critics accuse US President Barack Obama of being reluctant or too slow
to intervene in thorny foreign policy issues which have piled up under his watch, including the dramatic rise of the Islamic State, which has seized control of large swathes of land in the north and west of OPEC member Iraq.
A senior US defence official acknowledged that the US was providing arms and ammunition needed by the Kurds but said it was not coming from the Department of Defence. Officials said the Pentagon was having discussions about how to increase its military support to the Kurds and could soon approve a decision to directly supply weaponry.
FIRST SINCE 2011
Just last week Washington launched its first military action in Iraq since pulling its troops out in 2011. US warplanes bombed Sunni insurgents from the Islamic State, who have marched through northern and western Iraq
since June.
Washington says it is taking limited action to protect the Kurdish autonomous region and prevent what Obama called a potential "genocide" of religious minorities targeted by the militants.
The militants made new gains against Kurdish forces despite three days of US airstrikes, while Baghdad, long braced for the Sunni fighters to attack, was now tensing for possible clashes between forces loyal to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and those of his rivals after Iraq's president named a new prime minister on Monday.
Obama says a more inclusive government in Baghdad is a precondition for more aggressive US military support against the Islamic State. He has rejected calls in some quarters for a return of US ground troops, apart from several hundred military advisers sent in June.
I Reports by Reuters and AFP]