Britain’s role in Iraq no longer just humanitarian

Britain's role in the Iraq crisis has moved beyond a humanitarian mission, and its expanded operations could last for months, U.K. Defense Minister Michael Fallon said in a newspaper interview published on Monday. The remarks come after the United States launched a series of airstrikes against the Islamic State (IS) to try to reverse territorial gains by the armed group.

The U.K. had limited itself to aid drops, surveillance and a deal to transport more military supplies to Kurdish regional forces allied with the Iraqi central government against IS fighters who have overrun much of northern Iraq. In addition, Britain's trade envoy to Iraq has said special forces are gathering intelligence there.

"This is not simply a humanitarian mission," Fallon told The Times. He was reported as saying that RAF Tornado military jets and a spy plane were flying farther into Iraq, beyond the focus area of the humanitarian crisis in the Kurdish region, to gather information on IS forces.

The fighters of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region are struggling against better-armed forces from the IS, which has swept across northern Iraq since June, pushing back Kurdish forces and driving tens of thousands of minority Yazidis and Christians from their homes.

On Sunday the U.S. carried out a second day of airstrikes in the area. Fierce fighting is raging around the Mosul Dam as Kurdish peshmerga troops and Iraqi forces try to wrest Iraq’s largest dam back from the IS, which seized it just over a week ago.

IS fighters have seized several towns and oil fields as well in recent weeks, giving them the ability to flood cities or cut off water and electricity supplies.

U.S. Central Command said the latest attacks destroyed three armed vehicles, a vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft gun and one of the fighters' checkpoints. The attacks followed nine U.S. airstrikes on Saturday near the dam and the Kurdish capital, Irbil.

The U.S. airstrike campaign against the IS began earlier this month in the first direct U.S. military action in Iraq since the end of 2011, when the U.S. completed the withdrawal of its troops from the country. The White House said Sunday that President Barack Obama informed Congress that he authorized U.S. airstrikes to help retake control of the dam.

U.S. officials said last week the U.S. government was directly supplying weapons to peshmerga fighters.

Witnesses said Kurdish forces have recaptured the mainly Christian towns of Batmaiya and Telasqaf, 18 miles from Mosul — the closest they have come to the city since IS fighters drove out government forces in June.

The IS has tightened its security checkpoints in Mosul, conducting more intensive inspections of vehicles and identification cards, witnesses said.

Iraq's incoming prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, faces the challenges of reducing tensions that have revived a sectarian civil war and of addressing Kurdish independence ambitions. Since June the Kurds have capitalized on the chaos in northern Iraq, taking over oil fields in the disputed city of Kirkuk. 

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has warned against the formation of an independent Kurdish state, saying that would risk further destabilizing the region.

"An independent Kurdish state would ... create new tensions, possibly also with the states neighboring Iraq," he said in an interview published on Sunday in the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

Steinmeier, who met Abadi in Baghdad on Saturday, said the formation of a new government that all regions and religions could live under "is perhaps the last chance for cohesion in Iraq."

The European Union has allowed individual EU governments to supply arms and ammunition to Iraqi Kurds, provided there is the consent from the authorities in Baghdad. The U.S. is already supplying weapons.

In a televised statement, the office of the Iraqi army command on Sunday evening said, "We warn all parties not to exploit the current security situation in the north of Iraq and violate sovereign airspace to ship arms to local parties without approval of the central government."

Asked about possible German deliveries, Steinmeier said, "We're not ruling anything out. We're looking at what's possible and doing what is necessary as quickly as possible."

Masoud Barzani, president of Iraqi Kurdistan, reiterated his call for weapons from Germany and other Western countries in an interview with Bild am Sonntag.

Al Jazeera and Reuters