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France launches fresh strikes against IS in Iraq

French fighter jets have carried out a third round of air strikes against Islamic State jihadists in support of Iraqi ground forces, the defence ministry said on Monday.

Published: 20 October 2014 17:51 CEST

France launches fresh strikes against IS in Iraq

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters hold a position at a frontline in Yangije in September. Photo: JM Lopez/AFP

Two Rafale jets on Sunday destroyed two pick-up trucks belonging to the extremist group, which has seized vast swaths of Iraq and Syria.

"During an armed reconnaissance mission in the Tikrit region 200 km (124 miles) north of Baghdad, mobile targets were transmitted to flight crews," the ministry said on its website.

"After they were identified and confirmed as hostile by the Rafale pilots, they were targeted with three laser-guided GBU 12 bombs."

France carried out its first strikes under Operation Chammal, on September 19th, after joining a US-led coalition battling the jihadists. A second round took place on September 25th.

Fighter jets previously destroyed a logistics warehouse and four hangars containing military equipment used by IS militants.

France has nine fighter jets stationed at its Al Dhafra military base in the United Arab Emirates.

The United States first launched strikes in Iraq on August 8th and widened its campaign on September 23rd to include Syria, where the IS group has its headquarters.

So far, the coalition has attracted dozens of countries, though only a handful of Arab allies — Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — are participating in the strikes on Syria.

Five European countries have committed aircraft to Iraq only — Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France and the Netherlands — but Britain and France are the only ones so far to have carried out strikes.

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Erdogan links Swedish Nato approval to Turkish EU membership

“First, open the way to Turkey’s membership of the European Union, and then we will open it for Sweden, just as we had opened it for Finland,” Erdogan told a televised media appearance, before departing for the NATO summit in Lithuania.

Erdogan said “this is what I told” US President Joe Biden when the two leaders spoke by phone on Sunday.

Turkey first applied to be a member of the European Economic Community — a predecessor to the EU — in 1987. It became an EU candidate country in 1999 and formally launched membership negotiations with the bloc in 2005.

The talks stalled in 2016 over European concerns about Turkish human rights violations.

“I would like to underline one reality. Turkey has been waiting at the EU’s front door for 50 years,” Erdogan said. “Almost all the NATO members are EU members. I now am addressing these countries, which are making Turkey wait for more than 50 years, and I will address them again in Vilnius.”

Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, is due to meet Erdogan at 5pm on Monday in a last ditch attempt to win approval for the country’s Nato bid ahead of Nato’s summit in Vilnius on July 11th and 12th.

Turkey has previously explained its refusal to back Swedish membership as motivated by the country’s harbouring of people connected to the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist group, and the Gülen movement, who Erdogan blames for an attempted coup in 2016.

More recently, he has criticised Sweden’s willingness to allow pro-Kurdish groups to protest in Swedish cities and allow anti-Islamic protesters to burn copies of the Quran, the holy book of Islam.

In a sign of the likely reaction of counties which are members both of Nato and the EU, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the two issues should not be connected.

“Sweden meets all the requirements for Nato membership,” Scholz told reporters in Berlin. “The other question is one that is not connected with it and that is why I do not think it should be seen as a connected issue.”

Malena Britz, Associate Professor in Political Science at the Swedish Defence University, told public broadcaster SVT that Erdogan’s new gambit will have caught Sweden’s negotiators, the EU, and even Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg off guard.

“I think both the member states and Stoltenberg had expected this to be about Nato and not about what the EU is getting up to,” she said. “That’s not something Nato even has any control over. If Erdogan sticks to the idea that Turkey isn’t going to let Sweden into Nato until Turkey’s EU membership talks start again, then Sweden and Nato will need to think about another solution.”

Aras Lindh, a Turkey expert at the Swedish Institute of Foreign Affairs, agreed that the move had taken Nato by surprise.

“This came suddenly. I find it hard to believe that anything like this will become reality, although there could possibly be some sort of joint statement from the EU countries. I don’t think that any of the EU countries which are also Nato members were prepared for this issue.”

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