The U.S. Defense Department says a military assessment team has determined a humanitarian crisis involving thousands of Yazidis fleeing Sunni extremists in northern Iraq is less grave than previously feared. U.S. officials credit airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops for making a costly and risky evacuation mission less likely.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said a team of less than 20 U.S. military personnel, accompanied by officials of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), assessed the situation on Mount Sinjar early Wednesday. Kirby said the team did not engage in combat operations and all personnel returned safety to Irbil.
Returning from Asia Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the team determined international airdrops, U.S. airstrikes on targets of the Islamic State (IS/ISIL) group and efforts by the Kurdish peshmerga fighters allowed thousands of Yazidis trapped on the mountain to evacuate.
"Not only were there fewer people up there, but they were in relatively good condition, and the people up there credited our efforts with the water and the food and also buying space and time with those airstrikes against ISIL. So, that’s good news," Hagel said.
As a result, the defense chief said, a rescue mission appears less likely.
Pentagon spokesman Kirby said airdrops of food and water would continue. U.S. Central Command said a seventh such airdrop was conducted late Wednesday.
White House deputy National Security adviser Ben Rhodes Wednesday said the U.S. had conducted seven airstrikes against IS targets, but added a lasting solution to get the refugees to a safe space may still be needed.
“We don’t believe it’s sustainable to just have, you know, permanent airdrops to this population on the mountain," Rhodes said. "Some of them have been able to escape but, again, we want to get options in place to move them to a safer space."
Rhodes said the U.S. would cooperate with Kurdish forces and international partners. He insisted that does not involve U.S. troops re-entering a combat role in Iraq.
Ben Connable, a RAND Corp. senior international policy analyst and retired Marine intelligence officer, said a rescue operation in the region would be complicated.
"Picking people up and moving them into perhaps secured Kurdish areas sounds like a logical and safe thing to do, but it would also entail a lot of activities in the Kurdish areas; it would be a significant displacement for the Yazidis, and it might even have some political consequences," Connable said.
Attacks by Sunni militants since June have displaced thousands of minority Iraqi Christians and Yazidis as IS expands its self-declared caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.
Amid reports that incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is resisting calls to make way for Prime Minister-designate Haider al-Abadi in Baghdad, Rhodes said all Iraqi leaders should respect the peaceful political transition underway.
"There’s a new president, there’s a new speaker of Parliament and a Shi’ite alliance of different political blocs has put forward Dr. Abadi as a candidate for prime minister, and now the president has asked him to form a government," Rhodes said. "So, in our view, he is clearly the prime minister-designate in Iraq."
Rhodes said "all Iraqis have to respect" the process. "Frankly, any efforts to derail that process, any efforts to use violence instead of working peacefully through the political process, would be rejected not just by the United States, but by Iraqis themselves, by the international community."
Rhodes said there is an enormous opportunity with a new prime minister in place to get a unity government that all Iraq’s different factions can support and then turn the focus to where it needs to be, which is combating the threat from IS.
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