For years, Kurdish officials have beseeched the Obama administration to let them buy US weapons.
And for just as long, the administration has rebuffed the Kurds, America’s closest allies in Iraq.
US officials insisted they could only sell arms to the government in Baghdad, even after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki broke a written promise to deliver some of them to the Kurds, whose peaceful, semi-autonomous northern region has been the lone success story to come out of the 2003 US invasion. Now, the administration is confronting the consequences of that policy.
The Islamic State group, which some American officials have dubbed ‘a terrorist army’, overpowered lightly armed Kurdish units in a blitzkrieg that has threatened the Kurdish region and the American personnel stationed there.
President Barack Obama said on Saturday that the US had increased military aid to the Kurds, though he did not elaborate. White House officials said on Friday that Baghdad had sent the Kurds some weapons, a first after years of ill relations between the Kurds and the central government.
‘The US and the Iraqi government have stepped up our military assistance to Kurdish forces as they wage their fight,’ Obama said. In June, the Pentagon sent 300 military advisers to Iraq. Dozens of them are operating out of Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, which is now under threat from the Islamic State.