Iraq Crisis Deepens; US Directly Arms Kurds

18 fighter jets take off for mission in Iraq from the flight deck of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, in the Persian Gulf, Monday, Aug. 11, 2014. U.S. military officials said American fighter aircraft struck and destroyed several vehicles Sunday that were part of an Islamic State group convoy moving to attack Kurdish forces defending the northeastern Iraqi city of Irbil.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq's president snubbed incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and picked another politician Monday to form the next government, setting up a fierce political power struggle even as the country battles extremists in the north and west.

The showdown came as the United States increased its role in fighting back Sunni extremists of the Islamic State group that is threatening the autonomous Kurdish region in the north. Senior American officials said U.S. intelligence agencies are directly arming the Kurds who are battling the militants in what would be a shift in Washington's policy of only working through the central government in Baghdad.

U.S. warplanes carried out new strikes Sunday, hitting a convoy of Sunni militants moving to attack Kurdish forces defending the autonomous zone's capital, Irbil. The recent American airstrikes have helped the Kurds achieve one of their first victories after weeks of retreat as peshmerga fighters over the weekend recaptured two towns near Irbil. The Pentagon's director of operations said the effort will do little to slow Islamic State militants overall.

Haider al-Ibadi, the deputy speaker of parliament from al-Maliki's Shiite Dawa party, was selected by President Fouad Massoum to be the new prime minister and was given 30 days to present a new government to lawmakers for approval.

U.S. President Barack Obama called al-Ibadi's nomination a "promising step forward" and he urged "all Iraqi political leaders to work peacefully through the political process." But al-Maliki, who has been in power for eight years, defiantly rejected al-Ibadi's nomination as prime minister. In a speech after midnight Sunday, he accused Massoum of blocking his reappointment as prime minister and carrying out "a coup against the constitution and the political process."

In another speech broadcast Monday night, al-Maliki insisted al-Ibadi's nomination "runs against the constitutional procedures" and he accused the United States of siding with political forces "who have violated the constitution."

"Today, we are facing a grave constitutional breach and we have appealed and we have the proof that we are the largest bloc," al-Maliki said. "We assure all the Iraqi people and the political groups that there is no importance or value to this nomination," he added.

But despite angrily insisting he should be nominated for a third term, al-Maliki has lost some support with the main coalition of Shiite parties. His critics say al-Maliki contributed to Iraq's political crisis by monopolizing power and pursuing a sectarian agenda that alienated the country's Sunni and Kurdish minorities.

In welcoming the new Iraqi leadership amid the country's worst crisis since U.S. troops withdrew in 2011, Obama said the only lasting solution is the formation of an inclusive government. "These have been difficult days in Iraq," Obama said while on vacation on Martha's Vineyard. "I'm sure there are going to be difficult days ahead."

The nomination of al-Ibadi came hours after al-Maliki deployed his elite security troops in the streets of Baghdad. Hundreds of his supporters were escorted to a popular rally site by military trucks, raising fears he might try to stay in power by force.

"We are with you, al-Maliki," they shouted, waving posters of him as they sang and danced. Al-Ibadi, the former minister of communications from 2003-04, pledged to form a government to "protect the Iraqi people." He was nominated after receiving the majority of votes from lawmakers within the Iraqi National Alliance, a coalition of Shiite parties.

A peaceful transition is looking increasingly unlikely, given al-Maliki's reputation for having replaced many senior Sunni officers with less-experienced, more loyal Shiite officers. "One of the major concerns (the U.S.) had in 2010 is the degree to which al-Maliki was trying to coup-proof his military," said Richard Brennan, an expert on Iraqi special forces at Rand Corporation and former U.S. Department of Defense policymaker. "The U.S. worked hard with the military to make them understand that loyalty had to be to country, not to al-Maliki, but al-Maliki cut the forces to replace competent people with less-competent people loyal to him."

Vice President Joe Biden called Massoum to commend him for meeting a "key milestone" in nominating al-Ibadi. Prior to al-Ibadi's nomination, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in Sydney "there should be no use of force, no introduction of troops or militias into this moment of democracy for Iraq."

Kerry added a new government "is critical in terms of sustaining the stability and calm in Iraq," and that "our hope is that Mr. Maliki will not stir those waters." Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who has expressed fears that Iraq will fragment unless al-Maliki leaves power, expressed his concern about the political crisis in Baghdad in a call with newly elected Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"It is important for Iran that a person approved by a majority of the representatives of the people in the Iraqi parliament takes power and begins his legal actions in Iraq." The U.S. weapons being directly sent to Irbil are very limited in scope and number, and mostly consist of light arms like AK-47s and ammunition, a Kurdish government official and a senior Pentagon official said.

The Kurdish official said the weapons are being sent through U.S. intelligence agencies, and not the Pentagon or the State Department. Lt. Gen. William Mayville, the operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pentagon was looking at other ways to help the Kurds.

But the Kurdish official said the U.S. lethal aid is still not enough to battle the militants, even though peshmerga and other Kurdish forces were supplemented with similar munitions from Baghdad over the weekend. Neither official was authorized to discuss the U.S. arms by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.

U.S. airstrikes have reinvigorated Iraqi Kurdish forces battling the Islamic State and on Sunday, the Kurdish peshmerga fighters retook two towns — Makhmour and al-Gweir, some 28 miles (45 kilometers) from Irbil — from the Sunni militants in what was one of their first victories after weeks of retreat.

The successes were balanced out, however, by news of a defeat in the far eastern Diyala province where Kurdish forces were driven out of the town of Jalula after fierce fighting against the militants. The militants blasted their way into the town using a truck bomb followed up with several suicide bombers on foot, said a police officer and an army official, adding that at least 14 Kurdish fighters were killed.

Obama warned Saturday the new campaign in Iraq requires military and political changes and "is going to be a long-term project." The move to directly arm the Kurds underscores the level of U.S. concern about the Islamic State's gains — particularly at a time when there is such significant turmoil within the central government in Baghdad.

Turkey has warned al-Maliki that his actions threaten to deepen a crisis in Iraq and called on him to support Massoum and urged lawmakers to avoid actions that "deepen the turmoil in Iraq." In recent months, support for al-Maliki has waned, not only among politicians, but also from Iraq's Shiite religious establishment and particularly, its most revered cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is closely linked with Iraq's biggest ally, Iran.

Disunity is not exclusive to the Shiite coalition, however. Sunni political parties, once-superior under ousted leader Saddam Hussein, have also been at odds in recent months as they try to reassert themselves in al-Maliki's government while distancing themselves from the Sunni militant onslaught that has killed thousands.

It also has displaced more than 1.2 million people, said Kieran Dwyer, spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. "All of this amounts to a humanitarian catastrophe," Dwyer told reporters by phone from Irbil.

U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Rajiv Shah said the team will help speed food, water and other life-saving supplies to Iraqis. Much of the assistance will go to thousands of members of an Iraqi religious minority group known as Yazidis who have been trapped on a mountaintop in northwest Iraq to escape certain death by Sunni militants with the Islamic State group.

U.S. Central Command said Monday that it had conducted a fifth airdrop of food and water for thousands of members of the Yazidis. While violence has straddled the Syrian-Iraqi border in recent months and seeped deep into the heart of some of Iraq's most ancient and strategically located cities, some are warning that if a political solution is not found soon, Baghdad risks getting drawn into the war.

"Iraq could become a tale of two prime ministers, each claiming to have the constitution supporting their claim," said Ramzy Mardini, an Iraq expert with the Washington-based Atlantic Council. "It will either end by legal venue or by conflict."

Associated Press writers Sinan Salaheddin in Baghdad, Matthew Lee and Lolita C. Baldor in Sydney, Lara Jakes and Ken Dilanian in Washington, Nedra Pickler and Julie Pace in Martha's Vineyard, Mass; Edith M. Lederer at the United Nationsl, and Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.

US Sending Arms To Kurds In Iraq

U.S. and Kurdish flags flutter in the wind as displaced Iraqis from the Yazidi community cross the Syria-Iraq border at Feeshkhabour bridge over the Tigris River at Feeshkhabour border point, in northern Iraq, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014. Kurdish authorities at the border believe some 45,000 Yazidis passed the river crossing in the past week and thousands more are still stranded in the mountains.

SYDNEY (AP) — The Obama administration has begun directly providing weapons to Kurdish forces who have started to make gains against Islamic militants in northern Iraq, senior U.S. officials said Monday.

Previously, the U.S. had insisted on only selling arms to the Iraqi government in Baghdad, but the Kurdish peshmerga fighters had been losing ground to Islamic State militants in recent weeks. The officials wouldn't say which U.S. agency is providing the arms or what weapons are being sent, but one official said it isn't the Pentagon. The CIA has historically done similar quiet arming operations

The move to directly aid the Kurds underscores the level of U.S. concern about the Islamic State militants' gains in the north, and reflects the persistent administration view that the Iraqis must take the necessary steps to solve their own security problems.

To bolster that effort, the administration is also very close to approving plans for the Pentagon to arm the Kurds, a senior official said. In recent days, the U.S. military has been helping facilitate weapons deliveries from the Iraqis to the Kurds, providing logistic assistance and transportation to the north.

The additional assistance comes as Kurdish forces on Sunday took back two towns from the Islamic insurgents, aided in part by U.S. airstrikes in the region. President Barack Obama authorized the airstrikes to protect U.S. interests and personnel in the region, including at facilities in Irbil, as well as Yazidi refugees fleeing militants.

At the same time, the administration is watching carefully as a political crisis brews in Baghdad. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry urged the people of Iraq to remain calm amid the political and military upheaval.

Speaking in Australia on Monday, Kerry said there should be no use of force by political factions as Iraq struggles form a government. He said the people of Iraq have made clear their desire for change and that the country's new president is acting appropriately despite claims of malfeasance by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Maliki is resisting calls to step down and says he'll file a complaint against the president for not naming him prime minister. Kerry noted that Maliki's Shia bloc has put forward three other candidates for the prime minister job and says the U.S. stands with the new president, Fouad Massoum.

Maliki has accused Massoum of violating the constitution because he has not yet named a prime minister from the country's largest parliamentary faction, missing a Sunday deadline. "We believe that the government formation process is critical in terms of sustaining the stability and calm in Iraq," Kerry said. "And our hope is that Mr. Maliki will not stir those waters."

AP White House correspondent Julie Pace contributed to this report.

Tunisia's Fishermen Save Rising Tide Of Migrants

In this image taken from TV in African migrants sit in a corridor at the Red Crescent centre in Zarzis Tunisia Monday Aug. 5, 2014. Zarzis is like many other costal towns in Tunisia, it relies heavily on it's fishing industry, which employs many of the local men. The fishermen are netting a catch of a different kind too - migrants who attempt to cross the waters, trying to get in to Europe by sea. Many of these migrants have their sights set on a better life, fleeing conflicts in their home countries.

ZARZIS, TUNISIA (AP) — The fishermen of this small North African port are used to catching sea bass and sea bream in their nets, but lately they've been hauling in something else: shipwrecked migrants fleeing war-ravaged Libya on flimsy boats.

Chamseddine Bourassine, a Tunisian fisherman in his 50s, and his colleagues are on the front lines of a growing humanitarian disaster as waves of migrants take to the sea bound for Italy. They do their best to save who they can, but Bourassine says they're quickly being overcome by this year's flood of African and Middle Eastern migrants seeking a new life in Europe.

The fishermen, who are risking both their lives and livelihoods to rescue the migrants, often cite a saying by the Prophet Muhammad: "Who saves a life, saves all of humanity." "Today I have the means to bring back 107 people, but I'll lose 3,000 Tunisian dinars ($1,750)," Bourassine says. "Tomorrow I might not be able to. I have people who work with me. If I interrupt work once, twice, three times, it becomes a heavy burden on my shoulders."

He estimates he has saved more than 1,000 migrants on four separate occasions while out in his fishing boat, twice since the Libyan uprising in 2011. Bourassine and other fishermen don't take any rewards for saving the migrants and he understands why they are trying to leave. But he says it's not his job to save them and he feels there's been a lack of support from rescue organizations and governmental authorities.

Mansour Ben Chouikha, a fifty-something fisherman, paused while cleaning his rustic blue-and-white fishing vessel to describe the horrific scenes he has witnessed on the calm, peaceful waters off Zarzis, only 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the Libyan border. He says he has seen floating bodies decomposing in the Mediterranean, some missing their heads.

"We find them dead but we don't declare it," said Chouikha. "(If) there is a body in the water and we are six or seven hours from the land, we can't get them on board." The fishermen don't keep track of the number of migrants they recover — dead or alive. But they are unanimous in saying the numbers are rising. Last week two bodies were pulled out the water off the nearby coastal resort of Djerba.

"The other day, with my boat, I brought back 107 people, three or four died before my eyes, they fell in the water and they didn't know how to swim. My stability (of the boat) didn't allow me to act. One hundred and seven people represent a great danger for my crew," Bourassine said.

The fishermen complain that the authorities are turning a blind eye. Unlike the media storm that followed the October 2013 migrant disaster off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa — in which roughly 400 migrants died when their boats capsized — similar catastrophes go unmentioned in Tunisia.

The fishermen say they've seen up 30 boats of migrants leaving each day for Italy, each with a capacity of between 50 and 250 people, but it's difficult to get exact numbers. Organizations such as the Red Crescent are trying to help some of the migrants picked up by the Tunisian Coast Guard. A Tunisian Red Crescent official told The Associated Press they have looked after around 400 rescued migrants but that doesn't reflect the true number out in the sea.

The Italian navy has stepped up their rescue efforts since Lampedusa. On Monday they announced they had rescued more than 93,000 migrants since the start of the year. Despite the risks, migrants see the journey as their only option.

Abou Bakr Boudjan is a Gambian who found his way to Libya last year. Two months ago, he took a boat trying to reach Europe but was caught by the Coast Guard at sea. Now he is stuck in Zarzis trying to file for asylum with the support of the Red Crescent.

His dreams are simple: having a normal life and a job, whatever country he ends up in. "Anywhere I can now have freedom is OK. Here, Libya, Italy, anywhere," Boudjan said.

Keller reported from Paris.

A Year Later, Protest's Bloody End Divides Egypt

Wounded supporters of ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi lie on the floor of a makeshift hospital at a sit-in at Cairo's Nasr City district, Egypt. The scene on Aug. 14, 2013, was the start of the biggest massacre in modern Egyptian history, at least 624 people were killed during 12 hours of mayhem in Cairo’s Rabaah el-Adawiyah Square, though rights groups have said the toll may be several hundred higher.

CAIRO, Egypt (ASSOCIATED PRESS) — Around 6:30 a.m., police armored vehicles rumbled up to the barricades at the edges of the anti-government sit-in where thousands of Islamists had camped out for weeks in a Cairo square.

First came tear gas. Then quickly, police started using machine guns. Every five minutes, student Mahmoud el-Iddrissi remembers, they swept the barricade with bullets. A friend next to him stood to throw a firecracker and immediately fell, shot in his neck and shoulder.

The scene on Aug. 14, 2013, was the start of the biggest massacre in modern Egyptian history, as security forces crushed the sit-in by Islamist supporters of Mohammed Morsi, the elected president who had been removed by the military a month earlier. At least 624 people were killed during 12 hours of mayhem in Cairo's Rabaah el-Adawiyah Square, though rights groups have said the toll may be several hundred higher.

An Associated Press investigation into the day shows that commanders gave security forces virtually carte blanche to use deadly force. Authorities contend police only responded with live ammunition on anyone who fired on them — and eight policemen were killed by gunmen in the square during the assault.

But broad orders given to the security forces, revealed to AP, emphasized crushing resistance. The orders to police were to "act according to the situation and by degrees of escalation," two generals in the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of the police, told the AP. But also, security forces were told to expect protesters to have weapons and were free to swiftly move to eliminate them, they said.

"We explained earlier to them that self-defense is legitimate and they will not be subjected to prosecution later on," one general said. Steps were taken to ensure that. One of the generals said ammunition was brought to the troops from multiple storehouses to obfuscate its origin. Release logs were covered up, he said, so they could not be used as evidence if any policemen were prosecuted, as had happened previously after the protests against Mubarak.

A few days before the assault, a top Interior Ministry official gave a fiery speech to Central Security troops vowing revenge for policemen killed by Islamic militants. "The blood of our sons in the police will not go in vain," he told them, according to the generals. The two generals spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the planning.

Interviews with more than 20 surviving protesters, security officials and diplomats also uncovered another key factor. Both the military-backed government and Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, the main force behind the protest, staunchly resisted any concessions that international mediators hoped could avert the disaster. While giving mixed signals to mediators, the military-backed government never wavered from its stance that the sit-in had to be removed, and the Brotherhood and its allies increasingly committed their cause on an all-or-nothing stand in Rabaah.

The sit-in arose in response to rallies by millions of Egyptians demanding the removal of Morsi, the Brotherhood leader who had become Egypt's first freely elected president a year earlier. After his July 3, 2013, ouster by then-army chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the sit-in swelled with crowds of families camped out in hundreds of tents. From a stage at the center, prominent clerics and other figures daily told crowds they would hold out until Morsi was restored. A second, smaller sit-in was located across the capital in Nahda Square.

Tensions swelled throughout July. Security officials called Rabaah a threat, saying armed "terrorists" were among the protesters. Independent rights groups have since confirmed that there were a few carrying automatic weapons among the crowds, but that it hardly constituted an "armed camp." Twice, police opened fire on protesters in other parts of the city and killed more than 100.

Within 15 minutes of the start of the dispersal on Aug. 14, casualties started flooding into a clinic set up by protesters in the reception hall of the Rabaah Mosque: guards from the barricades on the sit-in's eastern edge with gaping wounds from heavy caliber guns, said Fatma Yahya Bayad, a surgeon in the clinic.

On the western side of the sit-in, police fired warning shots in the air for the first 20 minutes. Then they came under gunfire from nearby buildings, the two generals said. Lt. Mohammed Gouda, who was circulating with a loudspeaker to tell residents to stay indoors, was the first policeman shot and killed.

A key question about Rabaah is who shot first. A comparison of accounts does not definitively answer that because witnesses' recollection of timing is likely not exact. The generals said that when Gouda was killed, security forces panicked and let loose with heavy fire.

However, the accounts of Bayad, el-Bittar and el-Iddrissi suggest the first gunshot casualties among protesters — on the far side of the sit-in from Gouda's shooting — had already happened. Over the next 12 hours mayhem reigned. In Rabaah's reception hall clinic, bodies lined up in rooms as volunteers tried to treat the wounded. "I know I'm going to die, just give me something for the pain," one patient told Bayad. Tear gas barrages forced staff and wounded in the clinic to flee to a hospital, a few dozen yards away

Mohammed Gamal, a 21-year-old on the fifth floor of a building from which protesters were pelting police with stones, recalls seeing a man in the street below fall from a shot. "Another protester tried to crawl to him," Gamal remembered. "The minute he touched the body, he too was shot."

The final toll from Rabaah was 624 dead, according to the government's human rights agency. Gamal Abd-ul-Sattar, a senior figure in the Brotherhood-led anti-coup alliance, told the AP that the group documented names of 2,500 dead, though the highest tallies by independent rights groups are far lower, nearly 1,000.

Egyptian law allows police to use weapons to disperse assemblies that "present a danger to public security." Rights groups, however, say the issue is in proportionality, and courts tend to give wide leeway to police. "Everything today is up to who has the right and power to interpret (the law) and impose his interpretation," said prominent Egyptian rights lawyer Bahy Eddin Hassan.

Notably, the interior minister announced after the dispersal was over that weapons found in the square totaled nine automatic weapons, a pistol, five homemade guns and a large amount of ammunition. The question remains whether the day could have been averted.

A quartet of mediators stepped in — U.S. State Department official Robert Burns, EU envoy Bernadino Leon, and diplomats from Qatar, an ally of the Brotherhood, and the United Arab Emirates, an ally of Egypt's military. The mediators proposed the government release some Brotherhood leaders, while the protesters would reduce numbers in the squares and tone down rhetoric. International experts would investigate claims of weapons among the protesters and of violence on both sides.

In a prison meeting with the mediators, the Brotherhood's most powerful figure, deputy leader Khairat el-Shater, had been willing to start talks with authorities if a prominent Brotherhood member, Saad el-Katatni, were released from prison to act as a negotiator, Leon told the AP.

But Brotherhood leaders and their allies on the ground in Rabaah adhered to their stance that Morsi must be freed. "Any dialogue must be with the legitimately elected president," Abd-ul-Sattar said. And the government gave mixed signals on releasing el-Katatni, first saying charges against him were dropped, then announcing new ones that prevented his release.

In the end, each side's position on any deal was, Leon said: "It is the other side who should start first."

Missouri Crowd After Shooting: 'Kill The Police'

Lesley McSpadden, center, drops rose petals on the blood stains from her 18-year-old son Michael Brown who was shot and killed by police in the middle of the street in Ferguson, Mo., near St. Louis on Saturday, Aug. 9, 2014. McSpadden, told an acquaintance the shooting was "wrong and it was cold-hearted," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. A spokesman with the St. Louis County Police Department, which is investigating the shooting at the request of the local department, confirmed a Ferguson police officer shot the man. The spokesman didn't give the reason for the shooting.

FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — The fatal shooting of a black teenager by police sent hundreds of angry residents out of their apartments Saturday in a St. Louis suburb, igniting shouts of "kill the police" during a confrontation that lasted several hours.

A St. Louis County chapter of the NAACP called for the FBI to look into the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, a predominantly black suburb a few miles north of downtown St. Louis. Brown's grandmother, Desiree Harris, said she saw him running in her neighborhood Saturday afternoon when she passed him in her car. Just minutes later, after she returned home, she heard a commotion and went outside to check on it. Less than two blocks away, she found Brown's body.

"He was running this way," she said. "When I got up there, my grandson was lying on the pavement. I asked the police what happened. They didn't tell me nothing." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported several distraught relatives were outside talking with neighbors, including Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, and stepfather, Louis Head. Head held a sign that read: "Ferguson police just executed my unarmed son!!!"

A spokesman with the St. Louis County Police Department, which is investigating the shooting at the request of the local department, confirmed a Ferguson police officer shot the man. The spokesman didn't give the reason for the shooting. St. Louis County police said a large crowd confronted officers following the shooting, yelling such things as "kill the police."

John Gaskin, a member of the St. Louis County NAACP, said the FBI should get involved "to protect the integrity of the investigation." He alluded to the 2012 racially-charged shooting of a 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a Florida neighborhood watch organizer who was subsequently acquitted of murder charges, as well as the death of a New York man from a police chokehold after he was confronted for selling individual cigarettes on the street.

"With the recent events of a young man killed by the police in New York City and with Trayvon Martin and with all the other African-American young men that have been killed by police officers ... this is a dire concern to the NAACP, especially our local organization," Gaskin said.

Gaskin said officials in the organization spoke with St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar, who told them teenager had been shot twice. By early Saturday night, dozens of police cars remained parked near the shooting scene as mourners left votive candles, rose petals, a large stuffed animal and other remembrances at a makeshift memorial in the middle of the street. At the height of the post-shooting tensions, police at the scene called for about 60 other police units to respond to the area in Ferguson, a city of about 21,000 residents, about two-thirds of whom are black.

Harris said her grandson had recently graduated high school and was looking forward to the future, including possibly attending college. "My grandson never even got into a fight," she said. "He was just looking forward to getting on with his life. He was on his way."

Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson told the Post-Dispatch that the officer involved has been placed on paid administrative leave. "We are hoping for calm and for people to give us a chance to conduct a thorough investigation," Jackson said.

Gaskin said the angry crowd was reacting to a "trauma." "Anytime you have this type of event that's taken place, emotions are going to run high," he said. "But for 600 people to gather around an area to see where a man is lying in the street, that means something happened that should have not happened."

Associated Press writer Maria Sudekum contributed from Kansas City, Missouri.

Kurdish Pleas For Weapons May Finally Be Heard

U.S. Soldiers with the 5th Special Forces Group, 101st Airborne Division and Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Cooperation Council working with parachute riggers assigned to the 11th Quartermaster Co., Special Troops Battalion, 82nd Sustainment Brigade to palletize water for a humanitarian airdrop in Iraq Thursday, Aug. 7, 2014, at an undisclosed location in Southwest Asia.

WASHINGTON (AP) — For years, Kurdish officials have beseeched the Obama administration to let them buy U.S. weapons. And for just as long, the administration has rebuffed the Kurds, America's closest allies in Iraq.

U.S. officials insisted they could only sell arms to the government in Baghdad, even after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki broke a written promise to deliver some of them to the Kurds, whose peaceful, semi-autonomous northern region had been the lone success story to come out of the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Now, the administration is confronting the consequences of that policy. The Islamic State group, which some American officials have dubbed "a terrorist army," overpowered lightly armed Kurdish units in a blitzkrieg that has threatened the Kurdish region and the American personnel stationed there.

In June, the Pentagon dispatched 300 military advisers to Iraq. Dozens of them are operating out of Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, which is now under threat from the Islamic State. In a bitter irony, the extremists used American armored vehicles and weapons they had seized from the hapless Iraqi military to defeat Kurdish fighters who were blocked from acquiring just such equipment, U.S. and Kurdish officials said.

The U.S. sought to halt the extremists' advance Friday with airstrikes, but Kurdish officials also say Washington has promised to begin sending them arms. Pentagon officials say their policy hasn't changed — they will only sell arms to Baghdad.

That raises the question of whether the CIA has begun providing weapons in secret to the Kurds, something U.S. officials will neither confirm nor deny. The CIA declined to comment on whether it was sending arms.

But whether or not a covert program is underway, a growing number of voices are calling for the U.S. to begin openly and speedily arming the Kurds. "If Baghdad isn't supplying the Kurds with the weapons that they need, we should provide them directly to the Kurds," said Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who serves on the House Intelligence Committee.

"The only way to confront this threat is to arm Iraqi security forces and Kurdish forces, and yet we're doing nothing to support either one of those," said retired Gen. Michael Barbero, who used to run the mission training the Iraqi military. "It just doesn't make sense to me. It's an existential threat, so why we are not in there at least equipping and arming them?"

White House spokesman John Earnest said Friday the U.S. has begun stepping up its help to the Iraqi military and the Kurds. "We have a strong military-to-military relationship with Iraq's security forces, and the Iraqi security forces have shared some of those assets with Kurdish security forces," Earnest said. "We have also demonstrated a willingness to increase the flow of supplies, including arms, to Kurdish security forces as they confront the threat that's posed by ISIL."

In an interview published Saturday in The New York Times, Obama praised the Kurds and how they've governed their region of Iraq. But he said the U.S. does not want to get into the business of providing an air force for either the Iraqi government or the Kurds.

The president said he was telling the various factions, "We will be your partners, but we are not going to do it for you. We're not sending a bunch of U.S. troops back on the ground to keep a lid on things."

Karwan Zebari, spokesman for the Iraqi Kurdistan region in Washington, said in an interview that U.S. officials have assured him that guns and ammunition would be forthcoming. "Last night, they said, 'We will be moving expediently with providing you some military assets,'" he said Friday.

The U.S. has not wanted to stoke the Kurds' desire for, and Baghdad's fear of, an independent Kurdish state. Officials tried to steer some of the aid to the Kurds, but it didn't work. Under the Pentagon's foreign military sales program, some $200 million worth of American weapons that was supposed to be earmarked for the Kurds by the Maliki government was never delivered to them, Barbero said.

"This policy of one Iraq, everything goes through Baghdad, ignores the reality on the ground," Barbero said in an interview. Zebari and Barbero said Kurdish forces have been outgunned by ISIL troops driving in armored American Humvees and firing American machine guns seized from the Iraqi army.

"It's not that the peshmerga forces are scared or not willing to fight," Zebari said, referring to the Kurdish militia. "They are coming at us with armored Humvees and we're throwing these AK-47 bullets at them. It doesn't do anything. At some point you run out of bullets."

The Kurds have some tanks and armored vehicles, but not in Sinjar, a city far from the Kurdish seats of power in Irbil and Suliminiya. That city fell swiftly to an onslaught from Islamic State fighters, leading thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority to flee to a mountaintop, where the U.S. has airdropped supplies to stave off deaths from hunger and thirst.

Many of the peshmerga soldiers defending Sinjar had just six magazines of ammunition, said a former CIA official with close ties to the region who spoke on condition of anonymity because he got the information in confidence.

U.S. airstrikes are not "the endgame," Zebari said. "What has changed for the peshmerga on the ground? Nothing. We still need that military equipment."

Iraq Air Force To Back Kurds Fighting Islamists

Iraqis people from the Yazidi community arriving in Irbil in northern Iraq after Islamic militants attacked the towns of Sinjar and Zunmar. Around 40 thousand people crossed the bridge of Shela in Fishkhabur into the Northern Kurdish Region of Iraq, after being given an ultimatum by Islamic militants to either convert to Islam, pay a security tax, leave their homes, or die.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has called upon his country's armed forces to help the Kurdish military battle a Sunni militant offensive in northern Iraq that has caused tens of thousands of people from the minority Yazidi community to flee their homes.

It was the first sign of cooperation between Baghdad and Irbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, since Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, was taken over by the Islamic State group in June, signaling a degree of rapprochement in the face of the country's deteriorating security crisis.

Iraq's military spokesman Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said Monday that al-Maliki has commanded the air force to provide aerial support to the Kurds in the first sign of cooperation between the two militaries since Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, was captured by the militants on June 10.

Iraq is facing its worst crisis since the 2006 civil war when the Islamic State group captured large swaths of land straddling the Syria-Iraq border with the goal of establishing a self-styled caliphate.

When it overran the cities of Mosul and Tikrit in June, Iraqi security forces virtually collapsed, with police and soldiers abandoning arsenals of heavy weapons. The Islamic State captured the northern towns of Sinjar and Zumar on Saturday, prompting an estimated 40,000 from the minority Yazidi sect to flee, said Jawhar Ali Begg, a spokesman for the community.

The Sunni militants have targeted minority communities in areas they have conquered. "Their towns are now controlled by (Islamic State) and their shrine has been blown up," Begg told The Associated Press. The militant group gave the Yazidis, who follow an ancient religion with links to Zoroastrianism, an ultimatum to convert to Islam, pay a tax or face death, Begg added.

The United Nations said last month that more than 500,000 people have been displaced by the violence since June, bringing the total this year to 1.4 million, including more than 230,000 Syrian refugees. The group drove ethnic and religious minorities out of Mosul, and attacked mosques and shrines, claiming they contradicted strict Islamic teachings.

Kurdish forces have been battling with the militants for control of several towns stretching between the province of Nineveh and the Kurdish Iraqi province of Dahuk. At least 25 Kurdish fighters were killed in clashes with the militants on Sunday, and another 120 were wounded, according to Muhssin Mohamed, a Dahuk-based doctor.

A statement Monday by the Islamic State said it had captured dozens of Kurdish prisoners during the clashes and seized "large number" of weapons. The authenticity of the statement could not be verified, but it was posted on a website used by the group.

Kurdish state-media reported late Monday that peshmerga units surrounded the town of Shangal and were able to capture it from militants seeking refuge there.

Janssen reported from Dahuk, Iraq. Associated Press reporter Vivian Salama in Baghdad contributed to this report.

How Obama Decided On Airstrikes In Iraq

President Barack Obama meets with the National Security Council in the Situation Room of the White House, Thursday morning, Aug. 7, 2014, in Washington.

WASHINGTON (AP) — For much of the summer, President Barack Obama had watched with alarm as a brutal, al-Qaida-linked insurgency seized more and more territory in northern Iraq. But it wasn't until Thursday, when Obama learned that genocide could be imminent, that the president decided the U.S. military had to act.

The vivid reports streaming into the Situation Room that morning from U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials were unsettling, to say the least: Stories of mass executions, women being enslaved as child brides, members of a small religious group trapped on a mountain and potentially dying of thirst. The situation was falling apart — fast.

Then the president, for the first time, was given an assessment that thrust the crisis into an entirely new category. As one top official put it: "I had not heard the word 'genocide' used in the Situation Room before."

By the time 90-minute meeting ended, it was clear Obama planned to order humanitarian aid to be airdropped to the Yazidis, a religious minority being targeted by the Islamic State militant group. But advisers were still unsure whether Obama would go one step further: airstrikes in Iraq, just three years after the U.S. pulled out from a war that Obama never liked.

As a fast-growing Sunni rebellion overran major Iraqi cities in early June, Obama began weighing his options. A U.S. aircraft carrier was ordered into the Persian Gulf, and Obama began dispatching hundreds of special forces to advise Iraqis and protect U.S. personnel.

On one point, Obama was firm: No ground troops would return to Iraq. Yet the prospect of airstrikes hung in the air like an unpleasant smell — Obama was clearly reluctant to take that step, but it could prove critical to preventing a security collapse in Iraq.

As the thermometer climbed in July, temperatures were also rising in Washington, where some lawmakers were demanding immediate drone strikes while others were urging the opposite. A top senator threatened to block arms sales to Iraq, and House lawmakers easily passed a resolution to bar Obama from sending forces into Iraq long-term without their go-ahead.

Pentagon leaders were reviewing what assistance might help Iraq's beleaguered military, while diplomats pressed Iraqi leaders for a political transition that would enfranchise Sunnis and Kurds.

Wednesday was a major tipping point. Obama was engrossed in three days of meeting with dozens of African presidents he'd invited to Washington. But roughly 6,000 miles away, the Yazidis were in trouble, having fled to the mountains to escape the extremists.

With Obama at the summit, his team met throughout the day at the White House, where they learned that the Iraqis had tried — and failed — to resupply the Yazidis, who were in dire need of food and water.

The Kurds, America's closest allies in Iraq, had sought to hold off the extremists. But on Wednesday, the Kurdish militia started falling back, moving precipitously away from Iraq's largest hydroelectric dam as they sought to consolidate their forces to protect Irbil.

Eventually, insurgents took the dam. If fully breached, the dam could flood major swaths of land, endangering the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, joined Obama for the limo ride back to the White House, where Obama said he knew the Yazidis' humanitarian crisis must be addressed. Obama had plans to join the first lady at an Italian restaurant, but the Oval Office meeting dragged on. Dinner would have to wait.

By Thursday morning, things had only gotten worse. People were fleeing Irbil. Obama made clear he was inclined to approve military action, officials said, but held off on the final decision as he left to sign a veterans bill at a nearby army base. The officials discussed Obama's decision-making on the condition they not be identified.

Upon his return, Obama met for two hours with his team in the Situation Room, where Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, both abroad, were linked by videoconference. Obama announced he was authorizing two missions: airdrops for the Yazidis, and military strikes in the event Americans were in danger.

As dusk fell in Washington, cable news and Twitter were abuzz with reports about U.S. military action in Iraq. Though many were false, the White House didn't comment, fearing it could jeopardize the first humanitarian drop, which was underway under the cover of night.

Just after 9 p.m., reporters were hastily summoned to the State Dining Room, where a stoic Obama spoke to the nation.

"When many thousands of innocent civilians are faced with the danger of being wiped out, and we have the capacity to do something about it, we will take action," Obama said.

Reach Josh Lederman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP

US Bombs Militants In Iraq As Crisis Worsens

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters walk toward the front line with militants from the extremist Islamic State group, at the Khazer checkpoint outside of the city of Irbil in northern Iraq, Friday, Aug. 8, 2014. Iraqi Air Force has been carrying out strikes against the militants, and for the first time on Friday, U.S. war planes have directly targeted the extremist Islamic State group, which controls large areas of Syria and Iraq.

IRBIL, IRAQ (AP) — The U.S. unleashed its first airstrikes in northern Iraq against militants of the Islamic State group Friday amid a worsening humanitarian crisis. The extremists took captive hundreds of women from a religious minority, according to an Iraqi official, while thousands of other civilians fled in fear.

Many of America's allies backed the U.S. intervention, pledging urgent steps to assist the legions of refugees and displaced people. Those in jeopardy included thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority whose plight — trapped on a mountaintop by the militants — prompted the U.S. to airdrop crates of food and water to them.

The extremists' "campaign of terror against the innocent, including the Yazidi and Christian minorities, and its grotesque and targeted acts of violence bear all the warning signs and hallmarks of genocide," said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. "For anyone who needed a wake-up call, this is it."

Underscoring the sense of alarm, a spokesman for Iraq's human rights ministry said hundreds of Yazidi women had been seized by the militants. Kamil Amin, citing reports from the victims' families, said some of the women were being held in schools in Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul.

"We think that the terrorists by now consider them slaves and they have vicious plans for them," Amin told The Associated Press. "We think that these women are going to be used in demeaning ways by those terrorists to satisfy their animalistic urges in a way that contradicts all the human and Islamic values."

For the U.S. military, which withdrew its forces from Iraq in late 2011 after more than eight years of war, the re-engagement began when two F/A-18 jets dropped 500-pound bombs on a piece of artillery and the truck towing it. The Pentagon said the militants were using the artillery to shell Kurdish forces defending Irbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, and home to a U.S. consulate and about three dozen U.S. military trainers.

Later Friday, the U.S. launched a second round of airstrikes near Irbil, U.S. officials said. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the strikes publicly, said unmanned aircraft hit a mortar and four Navy F/A-18 fighter jets destroyed a seven-vehicle convoy.

The U.S. State Department warned U.S. citizens against all but essential travel to Iraq and said those in the country were at high risk for kidnapping and terrorist violence. Expanding from their stronghold of Mosul, the militants have captured a string of towns and Iraq's largest hydroelectric dam and reservoir in recent weeks. Ethnic and religious minorities, fearing persecution and slaughter, have fled as their towns fell.

Many had taken refuge in the Khazer Camp, set up near Irbil, but it was empty Friday as nearby fighting prompted families to flee once again. Some made their way by car or on foot to Irbil; others were unaccounted for amid the sea of fleeing people. According to the U.N., more than 500,000 people have been displaced by the violence in Iraq since June, bringing the total this year to well over 1 million.

In Irbil, hundreds of uprooted men crowded the streets of a Christian-dominated neighborhood, expressing relief at the news of U.S. airstrikes. Nazar, one man lingering outside a bare-bones building-turned-shelter, fled his mainly Christian town of Hamdaniya on Wednesday, when their home began to shudder from the blast of nearby mortar fire.

"We want a solution," said Nazar, who spoke on condition he be identified only by his first name, fearing his family's safety. "We don't to flee our homes and jobs like this. What is our future?" In contrast to Washington's decision to invade Iraq more than a decade ago, both the airdrop and the authorization of military action against the Islamic State group were widely welcomed by Iraqi and Kurdish officials fearful of the militants' advance.

"We thank Barack Obama," said Khalid Jamal Alber, from the Religious Affairs Ministry in the Kurdish government. In his announcement Thursday night, Obama had identified protecting the Yazidis and defending Americans as the two objectives for the airstrikes.

But on Friday, his spokesman, Josh Earnest, said the U.S. was also prepared to use military force to assist Iraqi forces and the Kurds' peshmerga militia. While Iraq's military has proven unable in many cases to thwart the Islamic State force's capture of key cities, Earnest called the peshmerga a "capable fighting force" that had shown an ability to regroup effectively.

At a checkpoint about 23 miles (38 kilometers) from Irbil, Kurdish militiamen vowed fierce resistance to any further Islamic State advances, but they also remarked on the ferocity of their foe. Capt. Ziyran Mahmoud, 28, said Islamic State fighters wore suicide belts as they advanced in armored vehicles and would detonate them — killing soldiers from both sides — if Kurdish fighters came too close.

"They are ready to blow themselves up and die," Mahmoud said. "But the peshmerga aren't afraid. We are also ready to die for our homeland." The Islamic State group captured Mosul in June, and then launched a blitz toward the south, sweeping over Sunni-majority towns almost to the capital, Baghdad. It already holds large parts of western Iraq, as well as swaths of neighboring Syria.

Iraqi government forces crumbled in the face of the assault but have since been able to prevent the militants from advancing into Shiite-majority areas. In the north, the Kurds have been the main line of defense against the radicals, but their fighters are stretched over a long front trying to fend them off.

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, traveling in India, said if Islamic militants threaten U.S. interests in Iraq or the thousands of refugees in the mountains, the U.S. military has enough intelligence to clearly single out the attackers and launch effective airstrikes.

He also said more than 60 of the 72 bundles of food and water airdropped onto the mountain reached the people stranded there. At the White House, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes met with members of the Iraqi Yazidi community and "noted that the United States will act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide," said Deputy NSC spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan. Rhodes "emphasized that the United States will continue to pursue a strategy that empowers Iraqis to confront this crisis, including by providing urgent assistance to Iraqi government and Kurdish forces," Meehan said.

The International Rescue Committee said it was providing emergency medical care for up to 4,000 dehydrated Yazidis, mostly women and children, who survived without food or water for up to six days hiding in the Sinjar mountains before fleeing to a refugee camp in Syria, where a civil war is raging.

Officials in Britain, Germany and elsewhere pledged financial aid to support humanitarian efforts in Iraq, and several top European officials supported Obama's decision to intervene with airstrikes. British Prime Minister David Cameron expressed special concern for the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar.

"They fear slaughter if they descend back down the slopes but face starvation and dehydration if they remain on the mountain," Cameron said. The world must help them in their hour of desperate need." One Yazidi man, who identified himself as Mikey Hassan, said he, his two brothers and their families fled into the Sinjar mountains and then escaped to the Kurdish city of Dohuk after two days by shooting their way past the militants. Hassan, in a telephone interview with the AP, said he and his family went about 17 hours with no food before getting some bread. Details of his account could not be independently corroborated.

Yazidis belong to ancient religion seen by the Islamic State group as heretical. The group also sees Shiite Muslims as apostates, and has demanded Christians either convert to Islam or pay a special tax.

Pope Francis also was engaged, sending an envoy to Iraq to show solidarity with Christians who have been forced from their homes. There also was a papal plea on Twitter: "Please take a moment to pray for all those who have been forced from their homes in Iraq."

In response to the fighting, Lufthansa, Turkish Airlines and other carriers canceled flights to and from Irbil. In the U.S., the FAA banned American carriers from flying over Iraq, saying hostilities there could threaten safety. British Airways also said it was temporarily suspending flights over Iraq

Associated Press writers Robert Burns and Josh Lederman in Washington, Danica Kirka in London, Caleb Jones in New York, Nicole Winfield in Rome, Sameer N. Yacoub and Vivian Salama in Baghdad, and Lolita C. Baldor in New Delhi contributed to this report.