Rescue of trapped Yazidis on hold as White House declares siege is over
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The Obama administration has said that the military mission to rescue thousand of Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar in Iraq is for now unlikely.
A team of Special Forces and US aid workers landed on Mount Sinjar to assess the situation of the Yazidis and found their condition not as bad as initially feared and the Yazidis received air drops of food, water and medicine, said Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, on Wednesday. Kirby said that humanitarian aid drops would continue. The US said that it had carried out its seventh air-drop of food and water on Wednesday, and had delivered more than 114,000 meals and 35,000 gallons of drinking water to the trapped people.
ISIS militants have seized large swathes of northern Iraq in recent months. The UN estimates show that tens of thousands of people, most from religious minorities, were trapped on the mountain after being forced to flee their homes.
The US had targeted ISIS area with four airstrikes since Saturday and the White House declared the mission a success on Wednesday. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, also on Wednesday stated that the UK would take part in getting the trapped Yazidis safely off the mountain.
Thousands of Yazidis reportedly, crossed into Iraqi Kurdistan with the help of a Syrian Kurdish group on Sunday by descending from the north slope of Mount Sinjar and traveling by land through Syria.
The UN, on Wednesday, declared the Iraq crisis a “three level emergency", its highest level of humanitarian crisis. Around 2 million Iraqis have been internally displaced by the crisis according to UN reports.