France says it will deliver arms to Kurds in Iraq

France will send weapons to Kurdish forces in Iraq to support their fight against the Islamic State, President François Hollande’s office said Wednesday. The announcement came as the United States said 130 Marines and special operations forces were sent to the Sinjar area and a defiant Nouri al-Maliki continued to rebuff calls for him to step down after eight years as prime minister. 

"To meet the urgent needs expressed by the regional authorities in Kurdistan, the head of state has decided, in agreement with Baghdad, to deliver weapons in the coming hours," Hollande's office said in a news release. "France intends to play an active role by providing, along with its partners and in liaison with the new Iraqi authorities, all the assistance required."

Paris has already provided 18 tons of humanitarian aid to the semiautonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, and a new shipment of 20 tons was due to arrive on Wednesday.

France has been pushing for days for an emergency meeting of EU foreign ministers to coordinate a European response to the crisis in Iraq, notably in terms of delivering arms. EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton announced on Wednesday that she was prepared to convene such a meeting "as early as this week" and was checking with member states whether this was possible.

Meanwhile, 130 U.S. military personnel were being sent to the Sinjar area, where thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority have been displaced, in what the Pentagon described as a temporary mission to assess the situation there and develop humanitarian aid options beyond current efforts.

"This is not a combat boots on the ground kind of operation," U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Tuesday. "We're not going back into Iraq in any of the same combat mission dimensions that we once were in in Iraq," he said, referring to the eight-year war that cost more than 4,400 U.S. lives and soured much of the American public on military involvement in Iraq.

The 130 were in addition to 90 U.S. military advisers already in Baghdad and 160 in a pair of operations centers — one in Irbil and one in Baghdad — working with Iraqi security forces. 

Meanwhile, Maliki said Wednesday he would not relinquish power until a federal court rules on what he called a "constitutional violation" by the president to replace him with another member of Maliki’s party.

The embattled premier has grown increasingly isolated, with Iraqi politicians and much of the international community lining up behind Haider al-Abadi, a fellow member of his Shia-dominated Dawa party tasked by the president with forming a new government aimed at uniting the country in the face of an onslaught by Sunni fighters.

"Holding on [to the premiership] is an ethical and patriotic duty to defend the rights of voters," he said in his weekly televised address to the nation. "The insistence on this until the end is to protect the state."

Al Jazeera and wire services