Updated Aug. 13, 2014 1:00 p.m. ET
The U.S. is considering a rescue mission in Iraq that will put its military in direct confrontation with Islamic State militants as France says it will deliver arms shipments to Kurdish forces in Iraq.
BRUSSELS—European countries on Wednesday looked set to scale up their involvement in Iraq with the bloc's foreign ministers called to an emergency meeting Friday to discuss the deepening crisis, while France announced it will ship weapons to the Kurds in the coming hours.
Still, a decade on from a bitter divide within the bloc over the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, it was unclear how many European Union governments were ready to play a significant military role to help Iraqi, Kurdish and U.S. forces stem the advance of the Sunni militant group, the Islamic State.
In a statement Wednesday morning, French President François Hollande's office said the plan for imminent arms deliveries to the semiautonomous Kurdish authorities had been agreed with Iraq's central government.
"France intends to play an active role by supplying, in coordination with its partners and Iraq's new authorities, all the necessary assistance," the statement said.
Kurdish Peshmerga fighters are straining to repel attacks by the Islamic State, which has gained controlled of large swaths of Syria and Iraq in recent months.
Mr. Hollande's announcement comes as the U.S. is eager to secure broad international support for its own military operation against the Islamic State. U.S. officials said Washington is exploring various ways to get ammunition and weapons from other nations to the Kurdish forces, including flying the supplies in itself.
On Tuesday, France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius urged his EU counterparts to interrupt their holidays and urgently discuss the matter in Brussels.
Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek said in a statement that his government is working "on [the] preparation of military supplies" for the forces fighting the Islamic State in Iraq.
A spokesman for Italy's foreign affairs ministry said the government is presently working on the issue. He pointed to comments by Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini in a radio interview Monday saying that the government "is evaluating ways of supporting the action of the Iraqi Kurdistan government, also from a military point of view."
The Kurds are equipped with mostly Russian and former Soviet weaponry. The Czech Republic is one of several member states from the former Soviet bloc that still has significant stockpiles of such weapons.
Nonetheless, other major EU powers like the U.K., appeared reluctant to get involved militarily in another Iraqi conflict. Prime Minister David Cameron said his government doesn't plan direct arms supplies to the Kurds but that the U.K. will help by transporting weapons sourced from other countries to the Kurdish authorities.
"This is a humanitarian [relief] operation that Britain is involved in," he told reporters after returning from his summer vacation to chair a security meeting.
German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday Germany is working toward supplying the military in northern Iraq with nonlethal supplies and transport. In an interview with broadcaster N-TV, the minister expressed "great worries" about Islamic State, and the "brutality and speed" of the group's advance.
One question facing the bloc's foreign ministers when they meet Friday is whether they can supply arms directly to the Kurds without the explicit buy-in of the Iraqi authorities.
The EU has an arms embargo on Iraq but after the U.S. invasion in 2003, the weapons ban was amended to allow arms to go to Iraq's central government and international forces in the country. There are some concerns within the bloc that this precludes member states from supplying weapons directly to the Kurds.
At a meeting of EU ambassadors on Tuesday, there was no opposition to the idea of helping the Kurds militarily, said European officials familiar with discussions. However there were concerns that weapons could fall into the wrong hands and that directly supplying Kurdish authorities could in the long-term add to the fractures within ethnically divided Iraq.
"There is a tremendous sense of urgency…that the situation in Iraq is getting out of hand," said the European diplomat. "The question is how far we go in our support."
The bloc is also looking to scale up its humanitarian involvement in Iraq.
The EU announced this week additional humanitarian aid for Iraqis and officials are looking at how they can best deliver food and water to thousands of Yazidi refugees who have been pushed into Iraq's Sinjar mountains by the Islamic State offensive. The U.S. is weighing a military mission to Iraq to rescue the Yazidi refugees, a move that risks putting American forces in direct confrontation with the Islamic State fighters for the first time.
Traditionally, many European governments are reluctant to sell weapons to conflict-torn countries—a view that played out in a protracted row last year between the U.K. and France and most other member states in 2013 over whether to allow weapons sales to Syria's opposition.
— Margaret Coker in London, Giada Zampano in Rome, Harriet Torry in Berlin, Sean Carney in Prague and Dion Nissenbaum in Washington contributed to this article.
Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com and David Gauthier-Villars at david.gauthier-villars@wsj.com
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1mJRQEL
0 comments:
Post a Comment