Friday, August 15, 2014
McClatchy newspapers
IRBIL, Iraq
Humanitarian aid workers warned Thursday that it was too soon to declare the U.S. mission to aid Yazidi refugees in northern Iraq a success, noting that at least 100,000 residents who fled the Islamic State’s capture of Sinjar now crowd cities and refugee camps and will need humanitarian assistance for months to come.
There is no prospect that Islamic State militants will be pushed from Sinjar soon — the only long-term solution to the Yazidi displacement.
“We don’t know exactly how many are still out there; it’s just too widely dispersed an area,” said one international aid worker who spoke anonymously because he did not have approval from his group’s media relations office.
The comment was in response to President Barack Obama’s declaration that U.S. military actions in northern Iraq had broken what he called the siege of a desolate mountain range where tens of thousands of Yazidis had fled after the Islamic State captured the nearby city of Sinjar.
In a brief appearance before reporters in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where he is on vacation, Obama said that it was “unlikely” United States aircraft would drop more food and water over the desolate Sinjar mountains and that “the majority” of 129 military advisers deployed to Irbil to help plan aid operations would soon depart Iraq.