The United States has not ruled out using American ground forces in an operation to extract thousands of desperate civilians trapped on a mountain by Islamist militants, but they will not engage in combat, a senior White House official said on Wednesday.
A team of 130 US military personnel is in the Kurdistan capital of Arbil, urgently drawing up options ranging from creating a safe corridor to an airlift to rescue those besieged
on Mount Sinjar for over a week, most of them members of the Yazidi religious minority.
"These 130 personnel are not going to be in a combat role in Iraq," White House deputy spokesman Ben Rhodes told reporters traveling with President Barack Obama, who is on vacation on Martha's Vineyard island in Massachusetts.
Rhodes noted that Obama had repeatedly ruled out "reintroducing US forces into combat on the ground in Iraq." But he added: "There are a variety of ways in which we can
support the safe removal of those people from the mountain."
Rhodes said the intention was to work with Kurdish forces already operating in the region and with the Iraqi military.
Kurdish fighters had been guarding Yazidi towns when armed Islamic State convoys swept in, and have already helped many thousand escape to safe areas to the north.
Obama has been deeply reluctant to revive any military role in Iraq after withdrawing the last combat troops in 2011 to end eight years of costly war that eroded the United States'
reputation around the world.
The president agreed last Thursday to send back more than 700 troops to help advise and guide Iraqi and Kurdish forces after a devastating sweep across northwestern Iraq by the Sunni Islamic State radicals, who have declared a caliphate in much of the country.
US warplanes have since carried out a series of attacks on Islamic State forces, including on forces approaching Arbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, and on roadblocks and artillery around Mount Sinjar to the west.
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