The Iraqi army is struggling to hold its ground in the fight against Islamic State militants, prompting the U.S. for the first time this year to airdrop bundles of food and ammunition for Iraqi units under siege at their nation’s largest oil refinery in Bayji.
U.S. aircraft on Saturday dropped 36 containers with 16,000 pounds of ammunition, about 2,000 gallons of water and more than 7,000 field ration meals for Iraqi army units that are holding the refinery but are completely surrounded by militants loyal to the Islamic State, according to U.S. Central Command officials.
A battle for Bayji’s oil refinery has raged since June when the militants seized parts of the nearby town south of Mosul along the Tigris River in Saladin Province. Control of the facility would give the militants a potentially large revenue stream in gasoline production.
The militants also have begun to threaten Baghdad International Airport, the former site of the largest U.S. military base in Iraq and today a vital transportation node for the small cadre of less than 1,600 U.S. troops deployed to Iraq. The facility also would be essential for any evacuation effort of civilians at the U.S. Embassy.
Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, explained that Islamic State forces approaching the airport in early September prompted U.S. commanders in Baghdad to send out UH-64 Apache helicopters for the first time to support Iraqi ground troops. The U.S. maintains a detachment of Apaches at the airport.
The Apaches fly low to the ground, posing far higher risk to U.S. troops compared with the high-flying fixed-wing aircraft used for close-air support missions since August. But Dempsey said in an interview Sunday with ABC News that the urgency of pushing back the militants from the airport was worth the risk.
“This is a case where you’re not going to wait until they’re climbing over the wall. They were within, you know, 20 or 25 kilometers [of the airport],” Dempsey said.
The militants had “overrun the Iraqi unit,” he added. “It was a straight shot to the airport. So, we’re not going to allow that to happen. We need that airport.”
While the Iraq army has been able to hold most of Baghdad, its likely that Islamic State forces will be able to hit some of the city’s urban neighborhoods with mortar fire, Dempsey said.
“We’ve been successful — mostly the Iraqis have been successful — in keeping them out of range. But I have no doubt there will be days when they use indirect fire into Baghdad,” Dempsey said.
Many military officials also worry that the militants are also close to seizing the entire Anbar province in western Iraq.
Dempsey said he is not recommending to President Obama any expansion of U.S. ground forces for now. But he said that at some future date, the U.S. will likely need to expand its mission to put more boots on the ground and provide the Iraqis with more robust support.
“Mosul will likely be the decisive battle in the ground campaign at some point in the future … when [the Iraqis] are ready to back on the offensive,” Dempsey told ABC News. “My instinct at this point is that that will require a different kind of advising and assisting, because of the complexity of that fight.”
