US strikes Islamist militants in Iraq

US fighters dropped bombs on Islamist militants in Iraq, the Pentagon says, carrying out US President Barack Obama’s promise of military force to counter the advancing militants and confront the threat they pose to Iraqi civilians and Americans still stationed there.

Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby says that two F/A-18 jets dropped 500-pound bombs on a piece of artillery and the truck towing it. Kirby says the fighters had taken off from the aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush in the Persian Gulf to conduct the mission. He says it isn’t clear how many militants might have been killed in the strike.

The Pentagon says the militants were using the artillery to shell Kurdish forces defending Irbil.

For the United States, it is a re-engagement in the long sectarian war from which American combat forces had been withdrawn — on President Barack Obama’s orders — in late 2011.

— AP