The United States conducted a new round of air strikes against Islamic State militants in northern Iraq on Sunday and moved some US diplomats out of its consulate in Arbil as Republicans slammed President Barack Obama's intervention as ineffective.
Republican Representative Peter King of New York, echoing other critics of Obama's policy in Iraq, criticized Obama for insisting he will not send U.S. ground troops to combat the militants, adding the United States has been too timid so far.
"We should take nothing off the table. We (should) start off with massive air attacks," King, a member of the US House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, told NBC'S "Meet the Press" program.
"I think doing them from aircraft carriers is limiting them. We should use bases in the area so we can have much more sustained air attacks. We should be aggressively arming the Kurds," King added.
Last week, Obama launched a campaign of US air strikes and humanitarian air drops in areas where militants, who have seized large swathes of Iraq since June, are threatening religious minorities and encroaching on Arbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.
The moves are the first direct U.S. military action in Iraq since Obama pulled U.S. troops out in 2011. Obama, who campaigned on ending the long, bloody U.S. war there, has been reluctant to wade back into Iraq. He has stressed the overall solution for the country rests with Iraqi political leaders and is urging them to end long-running feuds and form an inclusive government.
On Sunday, the U.S. military said U.S. planes had conducted air strikes on Islamic State targets for the third straight day.
The latest strikes aimed to help Kurdish Peshmerga forces defend Arbil, the site of a US consulate and a US-Iraqi joint military operations center.
The US military's Central Command said drone aircraft and fighter jets fired on armed vehicles and a mortar position belonging to fighters from Islamic State, which is an offshoot of al Qaeda.
The State Department's announcement several hours later that it had removed some staff from the nearby Arbil consulate showed U.S. concern over the severity of the threat to US personnel and to Iraq's viability as a state.
In June, the United States moved some staff from the giant, bunker-like US embassy in Baghdad to Arbil, which previously had been known for better security than the Iraqi capital, to the southern city of Basra and to Amman, Jordan.
On Sunday, the department said it had sent "a limited number of staff members from the Embassy in Baghdad and the Consulate General in Arbil to the Consulate General in Basra and the Iraq Support Unit in Amman."
It did not say how many staff had left Arbil or how many remained. About 40 US military personnel are now in Arbil at a joint US-Iraq military operations center.
The White House is still grappling with political fallout from a 2012 attack on a US facility in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the US ambassador there and three other Americans.
Obama said on Saturday a top priority was to keep Americans safe, adding, "We're not moving our embassy anytime soon. We're not moving our consulate anytime soon."
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