US warplanes pounded ISIS artillery positions in the city of Erbil today. Pentagon said US fighter jets had dropped 500-pound lase guided bombs on a truck towing artillery after it fired near US personnel outside the city of Erbil. The move follows US President Obama authorizing limited targeted strikes in northern Iraq to protect Iraqi and US interests against Islamic State militants. US Secretary of State John Kerry said the ISIS campaign of terror against religious and ethnic minorities and its grotesque violence is a manifestation of genocide and it has to be stopped. Cargo planes dropped crates of food and water over an area in the mountains outside Sinjar near the Syrian border, where thousands of fleeing members of Yazidi minority have taken shelter. The Islamic State has captured a string of ethnic and religious minority towns and villages in the north and sent Christians, Turkmans and Yazidi minority communities fleeing for their lives. The jihadists have even asked Yazidis and Christians to convert to Islam. According to UN estimates, about 50,000 Yazidis half of them children have fled to the mountains outside Sinjar where they are running out of food and water.

Iraqis have welcomed US action in Iraq. Iraqi Kurdish lawmaker, Ala Talabani called for a more aggressive strike in place of a limited targeted strike after the recent gains by the militants who were able to overcome both the Iraqi Army and Kurdish peshmerga forces. UN envoy on Iraq, Nikolay Mladnov has reiterated appeal for a concerted global action against the jihadist militants of the Islamic State Group who have seized large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria and are now threatening to overrun Kurdish areas. He told that United Nations is working to open humanitarian corridor so that those trapped in the conflict zone can be saved.