It is going to take more than supplies to stop ISIS.
Via The State
A C-17 air transport based in Charleston was among three U.S. aircraft that dropped supplies Thursday to Iraqi refugees trapped on a mountain in northern Iraq, the Pentagon confirmed Friday.
The S.C.-based plane dropped fresh drinking water to the refugees, including Christians and ethnic Yazidis, who had fled advancing forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, terror group.
The U.S. planes, two C-130 transports and the C-17, flew over the area for less than 15 minutes at a low altitude, dropping 5,300 gallons of water and 8,000 meals ready to eat.
The transport planes were escorted by F/A-18 fighters from the USS George H.W. Bush, an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. That carrier’s fighter-bombers, based at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia, later launched air strikes on ISIS positions near the Kurdish capitol of Irbil in Iraq.
‘Be very careful’
Meanwhile, S.C. veterans of the Iraq war and the state’s congressional delegation sounded off Friday on America’s return to combat in Iraq, three years after U.S. combat forces withdrew from Iraq.
“It’s worth doing, absolutely,” retired Air Force Lt. Col. Ben Bradley of Sumter said Friday of the latest U.S. intervention. “But I think we have to be very careful how far we get involved.
“I would not describe myself as war weary, but I don’t think we should be going headlong into things,” the former pilot who flew 50 missions over Iraq enforcing the no-fly zone before the Iraq War began in 2004.
Bradley, 43, said he empathizes with those fleeing the ISIS forces and is not surprised the U.S. is back militarily in Iraq. But strategically, “For these things, you really have to look at what kind of an outcome can you effect?”