ARBIL: US President Barack Obama vowed on Saturday to help rescue thousands of civilians besieged by militants on an Iraqi mountain, as an MP warned they would not survive much longer.
He gave no timetable for the first US operation in Iraq since the last American troops withdrew three years ago and put the onus on Iraqi politicians to form an inclusive government and turn the tide on militants expansion.
"The United States can't just look away. That's not who we are. We're Americans. We act. We lead. And that's what we're going to do on that mountain," Obama said.
US and Iraqi aircraft have air dropped food and water to the thousands of people, many of them members of the Yazidi minority, who have been stranded on Mount Sinjar since they fled Islamic State attacks on their homes a week ago.
France and Britain announced that aid consignments of their own were imminent.
Two Royal Air Force (RAF) C-130 transport planes took off from Britain Saturday carrying reusable filtration containers filled with clean water, tents, tarpaulins and solar lights that can also recharge mobile phones.
Amid reports that the children and elderly among them were already dying, Obama justified the decision to intervene Thursday with the risk of an impending genocide against the Yazidis.
Yazidi MP Vian Dakhil, whose poignant appeal in parliament this week made her the public voice of her community, said time was running out.
"We have one or two days left to help these people. After that they will start dying en masse," she told AFP Saturday .
The Yazidis, who worship a figure associated with the devil by many Muslims, are a small and closed community, one of Iraq's most vulnerable minorities.
After a first day of US air raids on fighters who had moved within striking distance of Kurdistan, a top official in the autonomous region said Friday the time had come for a fightback but there was no immediate sign that was happening.
The first US bombings struck IS positions and at least one convoy of vehicles carrying militants west of Arbil.
Security sources and a local official said the bodies of 16 Sunni extremists killed in Makhmur, where IS positions were bombed on Friday and fighting with peshmerga also took place, had been buried nearby on Saturday.
Obama said he had authorised the strikes in Iraq to protect US personnel serving there. "And, if necessary, that's what we will continue to do," he said Saturday.
Federal and Kurdish officials, who had been at loggerheads since IS fighters launched their an offensive exactly two months ago that has brought Iraq to the brink of partition, have said they were now working together and with US advisers.
But it remained unclear how much longer and how much deeper inside Iraq US warplanes would intervene and Obama stressed the real game-changer would be the much-delayed formation of an inclusive government. Until then, he said, "it is very hard to get a unified effort by Iraqis against" IS.
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