Besieged Iraqi Turkmen town begs for military help

Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, left, walks with Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in Baghdad, Iraq, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2014. Renzi started a one-day visit to Iraq, meeting with the outgoing Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and premier-designate, Haider al-Abadi, along with other officials.

Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, left, walks with Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in Baghdad, Iraq, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2014. Renzi started a one-day visit to Iraq, meeting with the outgoing Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and premier-designate, Haider al-Abadi, along with other officials.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

BAGHDAD -- Members of a minority Iraqi Shiite community whose town has been besieged by Sunni militants appealed to Iraq's military and the international community to intervene to end the siege, a lawmaker said Wednesday as the United Nations started an aid push to help Iraqis uprooted by the extremists.


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Also Wednesday, scattered attacks killed at least 11 people in and near Baghdad. The city has not been spared the almost daily violence even as the country grapples with the onslaught by the Islamic State group and its militant Sunni allies.

The siege of the northern town of Amrili, populated by Shiite Turkmens, is part of the Islamic State's offensive, which seized large swaths of western and northern Iraq this summer and also pushed farther in neighboring Syria.

The militants' rampage, however, suffered a major setback this week when Iraqi and Kurdish troops backed by U.S. airstrikes dislodged the Islamic fighters from a strategic dam near Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city which militants overran in June.

Turkmen lawmaker Fawzi Akram al-Tarzi said nearly 15,000 Turkmens in Amirli, about 105 miles north of Baghdad, have been besieged for the past two months by militants affiliated with the Islamic State.

The siege has left the residents in a dire situation, despite recent army airdrops of weapons, food and medical supplies. The town has no water or electricity, yet the residents are putting up a fierce resistance, al-Tarzi said.

"Amirli is besieged from all sides and calls for help are falling on deaf ears," he said, urging the U.S. to consider airstrikes on militant targets around the town.

Resident Jaafar Kadhim al-Bayati, a 41-year-old father of three, said children in Amirli are getting sick and that the town needs more help.

"We are starving, we ran out of food and the only clinic is not functioning now due to lack of medicines," he said. He added that a pregnant woman died while in labor this week. She was taken to the clinic but there was no one to help her there.

On Wednesday, the U.N. refugee agency launched an air, road and sea 10-day operation to help the displaced, including a four-day airlift with Boeing 747 planes that will carry aid from Aqaba, Jordan, to Iraq's northern Kurdish region.

The first flight landed Wednesday afternoon in the Iraqi Kurdish regional capital of Irbil, carrying 110 tons of emergency aid, the agency said.

Like other religious minority groups in Iraq, such as the Christians and the Yazidis, the Turkmen community has also been targeted by the Islamic State, which considers Turkmens to be apostates. Thousands of Turkmens have been uprooted from their homes since the Islamic State took Mosul, the northern city of Tikrit and a spate of towns and villages in the area.

Meanwhile, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi held talks with outgoing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the premier-designate, Haider al-Abadi, during a one-day visit to Baghdad. Al-Abadi has until Sept. 11 to submit a list of Cabinet members to the parliament for approval.

Also in Baghdad, six civilians were killed and 12 were wounded when a bomb in a parked car ripped a street, a police officer said. Mortar rounds in the northern Sabaa al-Bour neighborhood killed three and wounded nine, another police officer said.

And in the town of Mahmoudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, a bomb hidden in a garbage pile killed two people and wounded five, according to police officials there. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the news media.

In neighboring Syria on Wednesday, Islamic extremists fired rockets and tank shells at a major air base in the northeast, kicking off a long-anticipated offensive to seize the last position held by the Syrian government in a province that is a stronghold of the Islamic State group, activists said.

The attack on the Tabqa air base had been expected for weeks. Islamic State fighters have tightened their siege of the sprawling facility in recent days, capturing a string of nearby villages.

The group in recent months has virtually eliminated the presence of President Bashar Assad's military in Raqqa province, with the exception of Tabqa. The air base is one of the most significant government military facilities in the area, containing several warplane squadrons, helicopters, tanks, artillery and ammunition.

Last month, Islamic State fighters overran the sprawling Division 17 military base in Raqqa, killing at least 85 soldiers. Two weeks later, the extremists seized the nearby Brigade 93 base after days of heavy fighting.

Militant websites affiliated with the Islamic State announced the assault Wednesday.

Since July, after their blitz across Iraq and after they declared a self-ruled state straddling the Iraq-Syria border, Islamic State fighters have methodically picked off isolated government bases in northern and eastern Syria, killing and decapitating army commanders and pro-government militiamen.

Information for this article was contributed by Frances D'Emilio, Zeina Karam and Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press.

A Section on 08/21/2014