Iraq begged for US airstrikes against the Islamist rebels threatening to topple the government on Wednesday as rampaging jihadis at least briefly captured the crisis-torn nation’s largest oil refinery.
“We have a request from the Iraqi government for air power,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate hearing.
He stopped short of saying the United States would launch manned air or drone strikes against the militant Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but added, “It is in our national-security interest to counter [ISIS] wherever we find them.”
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Baghdad had asked for airstrikes “to break the morale” of the Sunni rebels.
American planes from a carrier in the Persian Gulf are flying surveillance missions over the country, Fox News reported.
Also Wednesday, President Obama briefed House and Senate leaders, telling them he didn’t need additional authority for any military action to deal with the crisis.
But the White House said Obama had made no decision about how to respond to the deteriorating situation in Iraq. The president has not ruled out drone or airstrikes, but has repeatedly said putting American boots on the ground is not an option.
The request for military muscle came as the extremists fought their way into the refinery in the northern city of Baiji, reportedly capturing 75 percent of the facility, which produces about half of Iraq’s domestic oil and gasoline.
“The militants have managed to break into the refinery. Now they are in control of the production units, administration building and four watchtowers,” an official, speaking from inside the complex, told Reuters.
“This is 75 percent of the refinery.”
But a military spokesman claimed later that the refinery was back under government control, and that the ISIS fighters were in retreat.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki struck an optimistic tone, vowing to teach the attackers a “lesson’’ — even though many of his American-trained soldiers had abandoned their posts amid the jihadis’ savage assault.
“It wasn’t the United States that lost anything; we turned a pretty significant situation over . . . to the Iraqi people when we phased out our military involvement to Iraq,” he told a Senate subcommittee, The Hill congressional newspaper reported.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama administration would like to see a new government in Iraq without al-Maliki. Such a government would include Sunnis and Kurds in an attempt to unify the country.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, meanwhile, warned that his Shiite-dominated country would fight to protect Shia shrines and religious sites in neighboring Iraq.
And tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites — including hijab-clad women clutching automatic weapons — answered clerics’ and government calls to protect Baghdad and other cities.
In another development, major oil companies evacuated workers. An Iraqi official said ExxonMobil conducted a major evacuation and BP had pulled out 20 percent of its staff from parts of southern Iraq, far from the fighting.