The Hill, 6 August 2014 – The Obama administration needs to boost its military support to Iraq’s Kurdish minority, which has suffered a string of setbacks in the last several days battling a Sunni militant group, according to key members of Congress.
This week, fighters from the insurgent group known as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) captured a slew of cities in northern Iraq and seized control of the country’s biggest dam in Mosul, which produces power for much of the surrounding area.
“It would be wise for the United States to lend air support, through the use of drones, to the Kurdish forces because if we do not it is going to be a humanitarian nightmare of unspeakable proportions,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) told The Hill on Monday.
He noted that militants had already seized a dam in Fallujah and there were reports the group aims to take control of the Haditha Dam in western Iraq.
If the militants succeed in capturing all three sites “they’re going to control the water, they’re going to control the electricity, they’re going to have at their disposal the capacity to flood Baghdad,” Royce warned.
ISIS in June conducted a series of successful raids to capture major towns in both Syria and Iraq and threatened to move on Baghdad. The strikes led President Obama to dispatch nearly 750 troops to Iraq to assess the country’s security forces and report back to Washington on how the United States might bolster them.