Yesterday there was shocking news of 40K people of the Yazidi religious minority trapped on a mountain by the ISIS forces without access to food and water. President Obama is giving consideration to coming to their assistance.
US considers air strikes and air drops to help Iraqis trapped on mountain by Isis
The Obama administration is considering aerial strikes and humanitarian air drops to help besieged religious minorities chased up a mountain by militants in Iraq.
The move comes as Iraq's largest Christian city was all but abandoned as the jihadist group Islamic State (Isis) advances through minority communities in the country's north-west and towards the Kurdish stronghold of Irbil.
The US military is already helping the Iraqi government coordinate air drops of vital supplies to at least 40,000 Iraqis, mostly from the Yazidi minority, trapped on top of Mount Sinjar in the north after death threats from the Islamists who have overrun much of Sunni and northern Iraq.
Internally, the Obama administration was said to be studying what additional steps it could take directly, to include direct US air drops to those Iraqis stranded on the mountain.
"We have been working urgently and directly with officials in Baghdad and Irbil to coordinate Iraqi airdrops to people in need," a US defense official said on condition of anonymity.
The people are not going completely without efforts to help them at present. The Iraqi military with some assistance from Turkey are making some air drops from helicopters and providing covering attacks on ISIS forces.
The situation on the mountain is just the most crucial event in a much larger flood of refugees pouring into Kurdish territory in an effort to escape genocidal annihilation. While it may strain the bounds of human imagination to contemplate, Iraq is becoming a much bigger disaster than it already was.