Two F/A-18E Super Hornet taking off from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, as the US jets struck jihadist positions in northern Iraq Friday. — Internet ARBIL, Aug 8 (Agencies): US jets struck jihadist positions in northern Iraq on Friday, a potential turning point in a two-month crisis Washington said was threatening to result in genocide and to expose US assets.
President Barack Obama's order for the first air strikes on Iraq since he put an end to US occupation in 2011 came after Islamic State (IS) militants made massive gains on the ground, seizing a dam and forcing a mass exodus of religious minorities.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby, writing on Twitter, said that US forces bombed the jihadists after artillery fire against Kurdish regional government forces defending their capital Arbil.
Two US jets hit a mobile artillery piece near Arbil, he said.
Obama ordered US warplanes back into Iraqi skies to stop jihadists from moving into autonomous Kurdistan of northern Iraq and carrying out a potential genocide against displaced minorities.
Meanwhile, The United Nations said it was working on opening a humanitarian corridor in northern Iraq to allow stranded civilians threatened by jihadist fighters to flee.
"Now that air drops have started, the UN in Iraq is urgently preparing a humanitarian corridor to allow those in need to flee the areas under threat," the top UN envoy in Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, said in a statement.
Emergency aid drops by the US are helping refugees trapped by Islamist militants in northern Iraq, but more must be done, a UN official has warned.
About 50,000 members of the Yazidi religious sect are surrounded by the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq.
The Sunni Muslim group, formerly known as Isis, now has control of large swathes of Iraq and Syria.
In June, IS took control of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and advanced south towards Baghdad.
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