US shipping arms to Iraqi Kurds

The United States has begun urgently shipping arms and ammunition to the Iraqi Kurdish forces battling an advance by extremist Islamic State militants, a State Department spokeswoman said Monday. ‘We're working with the government of Iraq to increasingly and very quickly get urgently needed arms to the Kurds,’ Marie Harf said. ‘This includes the Iraqis providing their own weapons from their own stocks, and we're working to do the same thing from our stocks of weapons that we have.’ Harf said the effort had been underway since last week, but did not say which us agency was leading the effort or how many and what type of weapons had been sent. The United States has a consulate and other facilities in Arbil, capital of Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region, and last week President Barack Obama announced air strikes to protect the city from the IS advance, according to AFP.