KARACA Turkey/BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Islamic State fighters tightened their siege of a town on Syria’s border with Turkey yesterday despite US-led air strikes aimed at defeating the militants in both Syria and Iraq, in a coalition which has now drawn widespread European support.
Britain, Washington’s closest ally in the wars of the last decade, joined an alliance after weeks of weighing its options. Britain’s parliament voted 542 to 43 to back Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to take part in air strikes in Iraq.
Belgium’s parliament also voted 114 to 2 to take part and Denmark said it would send planes. Six Belgian F-16s took off for a staging post in Greece even before the vote.
“This is not a threat on the far side of the world. Left unchecked, we will face a terrorist caliphate on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a NATO member, with a declared and proven intention to attack our country and our people,” Cameron told British lawmakers.
Until this week France was the only Western country to answer President Barack Obama’s call to join the campaign. Since Monday, Australia and the Netherlands have also joined. Yesterday Germany expressed support for the mission despite saying it would not send aircraft of its own.
Obama has sought international support for a military coalition against Islamic State, a powerful force in Syria which swept across northern Iraq in June, slaughtering prisoners and ordering Shi’ites and non-Muslims to convert or die.
The campaign has brought Washington back to the battlefield in Iraq that it left in 2011 and into Syria for the first time after avoiding involvement in a war that began the same year.
The coalition also includes several Arab states, all led by Sunni Muslims alarmed at the rise of Islamic State.
Islamic State has emerged as the most powerful Sunni militant group battling Shi’ite-backed governments in Iraq and Syria. The militants are also fighting rival Sunni rebel groups in Syria and Kurds in both Syria and Iraq, countries facing complex, multi-sided civil wars in which nearly every state in the Middle East has a stake.
French public support for the mission surged this week after the beheading of a French tourist in Algeria by captors who said it was retaliation for French participation in strikes in Iraq.
Paris said it might also join US strikes in Syria although there was no plan yet to do so. European countries have so far agreed only to strike targets in Iraq, where the government has asked for help, and not in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has not given permission, although he has not objected. Russia questioned the legality of US and Arab air strikes in Syria because they were carried out without the approval of Damascus, Moscow’s ally.
“It’s very important that such cooperation with Syrian authorities is established, even now that it’s an accomplished fact,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
More than a month since the US military began striking Islamic State targets in Iraq, and four days since it extended the campaign into Syria, there are signs fighters are lowering their profile in areas they control to become a harder target.
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week’s strikes in Syria had disrupted Islamic State’s command, control and logistics capabilities.
But Dempsey said a Western-backed opposition force of 12,000 to 15,000 would be needed to retake areas of eastern Syria controlled by the militants. US assessment teams have arrived in Saudi Arabia to map out a programme expected to train more than 5,000 opposition fighters in the first year. “We have to do it right, not fast,” Dempsey said.
The air campaign has yet to halt Islamic State’s advance in Syria, where fighters have laid siege to a Kurdish town on the Turkish border, sending 140,000 refugees across the frontier since last week in the fastest exodus of the three-and-a-half-year-old civil war.
The main battle in northern Syria has been visible from across the border in Turkey. The boom of artillery and bursts of machine-gun fire echoed across the area and at least two shells hit a vineyard on the Turkish side of the border, though there were no immediate reports of casualties inside Turkey.
