War planes strike near Baghdad

US aircraft attacked an Islamic State emplacement near Baghdad, yesterday. It was the first time that the US had targeted the terrorists close to the Iraqi capital.

A US defence official said that US warplanes had made one air strike near Baghdad and another near Mount Sinjar, in the north of Iraq, in the past 24 hours.

The US last month began a campaign of air strikes against IS positions in northern Iraq but now the scope of the mission has been broadened.

"US military forces continued to attack IS terrorists in Iraq, employing fighter aircraft to conduct two air strikes on Sunday and Monday in support of Iraqi security forces near Sinjar, and southwest of Baghdad," the US military's Central Command said.

"The air strike southwest of Baghdad was the first as part of our expanded efforts beyond protecting our own people and humanitarian missions to hit IS targets as Iraqi forces go on offensive, as outlined in the president's speech on Wednesday last week," it said.

The strikes destroyed six IS vehicles near Sinjar and an emplacement near Baghdad that had been firing on Iraqi forces.

The world's top diplomats have promised to support Iraq in its fight against IS by "any means necessary", including "appropriate military assistance".

The international community is scrambling to contain the IS jihadists, who have rampaged across Iraq and Syria and could number as many as 31500, according to the CIA.

• Syrian air defences would be destroyed if they attempted to respond to US air strikes against IS targets, senior US officials said.

President Barack Obama's authorisation of the use of American air power against IS in Syria has raised the question of how President Bashar al-Assad would react to such attacks.

He has said that Syria would regard US air strikes on IS as aggression unless the US coordinated its actions with Damascus.

Senior US officials said it would be unwise for al-Assad to interfere and that the US had "a good sense" of where Syrian air defences and command-and-control facilities were located.