Airpower Over Iraq? We’ll Never Be Over Iraq
By Yesterday, the Air Force dropped 8000 MREs and 5300 gallons of water to Yazidi refugees on Mt. Sinjar. That’s enough water for roughly 8000 refugees for one day; the MREs can be stretched farther. USN F/A-18s escorted the mission. If the US is serious about maintaining the Yazidi, it will need to either scale up the airlift by a factor of five, or use airstrikes to open a corridor for supply from Kurdish held territory.
On that point, F/A-18s struck ISIL artillery near Erbil this morning. No indication yet of how widely the administration intends to bomb, or of the operational purposes it hopes to achieve.