EU mulls Iraq support

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said the Foreign Affairs Council would be meeting in Brussels on Friday.

Paris and London have already agreed to coordinate their actions on both humanitarian aid and arms, the office of President Francois Hollande said in a statement on Wednesday.

It said the French president had spoken with British Prime Minister David Cameron Wednesday evening and agreed on the need for an "extremely rapid response," but didn't clarify whether Britain had agreed to provide weapons to the Kurds, who are trying to push back radicals of the IS group.

Earlier, Paris confirmed that it had begun shipping arms to northern Iraq. "In order to respond to the urgent need expressed by the Kurdistan regional authorities, the president has decided, in agreement with Baghdad, to deliver arms," Hollande said.

Germany mulls support

For Germany's part, Chancellor Angela Merkel has defended the statements of her European counterparts, without, however, pledging any lethal aid.

“Our government is currently looking into ways to provided assistance to the [hundreds of thousands of people] who need it in Iraq,” Merkel said in an interview with the online version of the daily Thüringer Allgemeine.

On Tuesday, Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen announced that Germany would support Iraq's army by delivering nonlethal military aid such as armored vehicles, helmets, night-vision equipment, booby-trap detectors and medical supplies.

"If it is a question of preventing genocide, it is our duty to intensively discuss what can be done," the defense minister was quoted by the German news agency dpa as saying.

Meanwhile, other Western allies have gradually agreed to limited involvement in Iraq, where the extremist group "Islamic State" has taken over a number of its northern cities and threatened to destabilize the country.

US President Barack Obama has said he is not ruling out the use of ground forces in an operation to extract thousands of Yazidi civilians trapped in the Sinjar mountains by militants.

Last week, an advance on the city of Irbil prompted a mass exodus of tens of thousands of residents. This coincided with US authorized targeted air strikes against militants in several areas, particularly near the Sinjar mountains where thousands of the Yazidi minority remain trapped.

glb/hc (AFP, AFP, dpa, Reuters)