The Obama administration has ruled out for now a risky US military mission to rescue thousands of Iraqis stranded on a northern Iraqi mountain, declaring a siege by Islamist extremists to be over.

After a small complement of special forces and US aid workers landed on Mount Sinjar to assess the situation of the Iraqi Yazidis – who for days have received air drops of food, water and medicine – the Pentagon said things were not as bad as initially feared. “An evacuation mission is far less likely,” said Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, late on Wednesday.

US humanitarian aid drops would continue, Kirby said, but for now US planes or troops would not come to rescue the remaining Yazidis from the mountaintop terrain that has provided a harsh refuge.



The US has targeted Isis positions in the area with four air strikes since Saturday. The White House confidently declared the mission a success on Wednesday. “The president’s decisive decisions in the immediate wake of the crisis kept people alive and broke the siege of the mountain,” a White House official said.

Speculation swirled throughout Wednesday that an evacuation mission was in the offing. Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, said President Barack Obama was “open to recommendations” from the military to facilitate the removal of people whom the US had warned for nearly a week were at risk of genocide. “If there are additional things we can do as part of an effort to move people off the mountain he will certainly review those options,” Rhodes said.



The British prime minister, David Cameron, also on Wednesday confidently stated that the UK would take part in getting the Yazidis safely off the mountain. “I can confirm that detailed plans are now being put in place and are under way and that Britain will play a role in delivering them,” Cameron said.

But Kirby said in a statement that the team on Mount Sinjar found a situation less dire than the administration and international organizations initially thought when the US sent its warplanes back to Iraq for the first time since 2011.

“There are far fewer Yazidis on Mount Sinjar than previously feared,” Kirby said, crediting “the success of the humanitarian air drops, air strikes on [Isis] targets, the efforts of the Peshmerga [Kurdish guerillas] and the ability of thousands of Yazidis to evacuate from the mountain each night over the last several days”.

On Sunday thousands of Yazidis, aided by a Syrian Kurdish group, were said to have crossed into Iraqi Kurdistan, apparently by descending from the north slope of Mount Sinjar and traveling by land through Syria.

US Central Command, responsible for US military operations in the Middle East and south Asia, would not provide any additional detail on Wednesday concerning the special forces’ assessment. It remains unclear how many Yazidis are still on the mountain, and international estimates vary. Some reports had earlier suggested that up to 30,00 people were still there.

Kirby’s statement left unanswered who decided against the evacuation, attributing the decision to “the interagency”, a bureaucratic term for the various US government security agencies, rather than Obama, the defence secretary Chuck Hagel or army General Lloyd Austin, the Central Command chief.

Nor did he definitively rule out an evacuation at a later point.

Despite the declarations of the US administration, the United Nations on Wednesday said it considered Iraq in general to be at the highest level of humanitarian crisis. Special representative Nickolay Mladenov said a level three emergency was in effect, triggering additional aid for Iraq.

Since Saturday the US has launched four rounds of airstrikes on Isis positions, checkpoints, vehicles and artillery in the vicinity of the mountain and the town of Sinjar at its foot. The most recent was a drone strike occurring at midday on Wednesday eastern time. All the strikes have come to the south, south-east and southwest of Mt. Sinjar, with the northern slope – apparently where the Yazidis’ descent has occurred – left unharassed.

The logistical complexity of removing the Yazidis by air appears to be significant. While C-130 cargo planes can land on rugged terrain, the number of civilians atop the mountain would necessitate numerous runs. On Monday a senior US army officer, Lieutenant General William Mayville of the Joint Staff, said the military had yet to finish devising a plan for an evacuation.

On Saturday, addressing the siege in a radio address, Obama said: “Today America is helping,” he said.

“When there’s a situation like the one on this mountain – when countless innocent people are facing a massacre, and when we have the ability to help prevent it – the United States can’t just look away. That’s not who we are. We’re Americans. We act. We lead. And that’s what we’re going to do on that mountain.”