U.S. President Barack Obama says he has authorized the U.S. military to launch targeted airstrikes if Islamic militants advance toward American personnel in northern Iraq.

In a late night statement from the White House, the president also announced that the military carried out airdrops of food and medicine in Iraq to address a humanitarian crisis among as many as 40,000 members of religious minorities who took shelter on a mountaintop after death threats from the Islamic State, according to administration officials. “Today America is coming to help,” he said.

The announcements marked the deepest American engagement in Iraq since U.S. troops withdrew in late 2011 after nearly a decade of war.

Though he said the U.S. would not send combat troops to Iraq, Obama said the fighters of the Islamic State, a Sunni militant group that has seized control of large parts of northern and western Iraq, have particularly targeted Iraqi Christians and the Yazidis, a pre-Islamic sect.

They have threatened to wipe out the Yazidis entirely, “a threatened act of genocide,” that the U.S. can act to prevent, he said, adding, “when we face a situation like we do on that mountain” where thousands of women and children are in danger and the U.S. has “unique capabilities to avert a massacre,” the country should act and not “turn a blind eye” to suffering.

Kurdish and Iraqi officials said Thursday night that airstrikes had begun on towns in northern Iraq seized by the Islamists, but Pentagon officials firmly denied involvement. They said it was possible that U.S. allies, either the Iraqi or Turkish militaries, had conducted the bombing.

Kurdish officials said the bombings had initially targeted Islamic State fighters who had seized two towns, Gwer and Mahmour, near the main Kurdish capital of Irbil.

Administration officials said Obama had considered airstrikes on Islamic State targets in northern Iraq aimed at preventing the fall of Irbil, as the Islamic militants continued to press advances.

For Obama, airstrikes also mark an abrupt turning point in his Iraq strategy. Analysts said that any kind of military action opened the door for a far bigger U.S. role in the conflict between the Iraqi government and the militant group.

Obama has been reluctant to order direct military action in Iraq while Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki remains in office, but in recent weeks there had been repeated pleas from Kurdish officials for arms, weapons and assistance as Islamic State militants have swept across northwestern Iraq.

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The militants, an offshoot of Al Qaeda, view Iraq’s majority Shiite and minority Christians and Yazidis, a Kurdish religious group, as infidels.

Deliberations at the White House went on all day Thursday, as reports surfaced that administration officials were considering either humanitarian flights, airstrikes or both. Administration officials did not say when the flights will begin.

Shortly after 6 p.m., the White House released a photo of Obama consulting his national security team in the Situation Room. To his right was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey. Watching from across the table were Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, and her principal deputy, Antony J. Blinken. On the wall behind them, the clock recorded the time: 10:37 a.m.

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The crisis gripping Iraq rapidly escalated Thursday with a re-energized Islamic State storming new northern towns and seizing a strategic dam as Iraq’s most formidable military force, the Kurdish peshmerga, were routed in the face of the onslaught.

The loss of the Mosul Dam, the largest in Iraq, to the insurgents was the most dramatic consequence of a dayslong militant offensive in the north, which has sent tens of thousands of refugees, many from the Yazidi minority, fleeing into a vast mountainous landscape.

In one captured town, Sinjar, the Islamic State executed dozens of Yazidi men, and kept the dead men’s wives for unmarried jihadi fighters. Panic on Thursday even spread to Irbil, long considered a safe haven, with civilians flooding the airport in a futile attempt to buy tickets to Baghdad.

U.S. administration officials said on Thursday that the crisis on Sinjar Mountain in northern Iraq forced their hand.

Some 40 children have already died from the heat and dehydration, according to the United Nations organization, UNICEF, while more than 40,000 people have been taking shelter in the mountains without food, water or access to supplies.

Forces with the Islamic State are not believed to have surface-to-air missiles, but they do have machine guns, which could hit U.S. C-130 planes that would likely drop the food and medical supplies at an altitude of 500-1,200 feet, according to James M. Dubik, a retired Army lieutenant general who oversaw the training of the Iraqi army in 2007 and 2008.

“These are low and slow aircraft,” Dubik said. At the very minimum, he said, the United States would have to be prepared for “some defensive use of air power to prevent” the militant group from attacking U.S. planes, or going after the humanitarian supplies themselves.

If ordered, the Air Force could use both drones and F-16 fighter jets which are already deployed in the region, while the Navy could use F-18 fighters as well, military officials said.

But it is one thing to use air power to defend a humanitarian operation. Offensive strikes on Islamic State targets in northern Iraq would take U.S. involvement in the conflict to a new level, demonstrating deep concern with the Islamists’ offensive shift toward the Kurds.

Ever since Sunni militants with the Islamic State took over Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, on June 10, Iraqis have feared that Baghdad, to the south, was the insurgents’ goal. But in recent weeks, the militant group has concentrated on trying to push the Kurds back from areas where Sunnis also live along the border between Kurdistan and Nineveh province. It has taken on the powerful Kurdish militias, which were thought to be a bulwark against the advance, and which control huge oil reserves in Kurdistan and broader parts of northern Iraq.

On Thursday, one Kurdish official said in an interview that Kurdish troops had pulled back in the expectation that there would be airstrikes, perhaps by Turkey and the U.S. French President François Hollande pledged his country’s “support” to forces battling the militant group as well.

An alarmed UN Security Council on Thursday condemned attacks and persecution of minorities in Iraq as the Islamic State militant group expanded its grip on the northern part of the country.

The council said the attacks on civilians because of their ethnic, political or religious beliefs may constitute crimes against humanity and that those responsible should be held accountable.

With files from The Associated Press

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