US airstrikes on militants from the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq risk escalating the country’s civil war with “disastrous unintended consequences”, anti-war campaigner Kevin Martin told RIA Novosti Friday.
“The spreading of the violent civil war in Iraq has President Obama considering military strikes, along with air drops of food, water and medicine to beleaguered Yazidi and other persecuted minorities stranded on a mountain top in northern Iraq, besieged by the ISIS fighters,” said Martin, executive director of Peace Action.
“This gut-wrenching situation in Iraq does not justify the US escalation of the civil war, entailing certain if unknown disastrous unintended consequences, as we’ve seen before in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere.”
The Pentagon said American aircraft attacked artillery that was being used against Kurdish forces defending the Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, on Friday - hours after US President Barack Obama had authorized air strikes and aid drops.
The IS, a Sunni militant group formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), now controls swathes of Iraq and Syria. Fighters with the IS seized three towns during last weekend offensive, among them the town of Sinjar, which is home to many Yazidi Kurds, an ethnic and religious minority in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan.
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