Lebanon is buckling under the strain of Syria’s war The difficulty of hosting so many refugees from the conflict has been …

    The bishops of Oriental Churches on Thursday demanded Muslim religious authorities to issue fatwas banning attacks against Christians and “other …

Iraqi Christians who fled violence in their village arrive at a church in the Kurdish city of Erbil on Thursday. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

President Obama: U.S. Military Authorized to Make Targeted Airstrikes in Northern Iraq

*Obama: Airstrikes to Be Taken Only if Necessary

*Obama: U.S. Can't Turn Blind Eye to Potential Act of Genocide

MORE TO COME

The Obama administration was preparing plans late Thursday for airstrikes against Islamist militants in northern Iraq, and began an emergency airdrop of water and food to members of a religious minority trapped in the mountains by advancing Islamist militants, U.S. officials said.

The sudden acceleration of U.S. military activity reflected White House concern over a burgeoning crisis in the semiautonomous Kurdish region of Iraq as the militant group calling itself Islamic State closed in on the area and pressed an offensive against local forces, seizing areas long considered safe. Militants on Thursday took over the Mosul Dam, the country's largest, according to a local resident.

The administration was actively considering U.S. airstrikes against the militant group's positions to protect U.S. military and diplomatic personnel working in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil. Pentagon officials said no U.S. strikes had begun by Thursday evening. An Iraqi military official said the Iraqi air force conducted some airstrikes Thursday.

Baghdad, Iraq, Aug 7, 2014 / 10:41 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The seizure of Iraq’s largest Christian town has prompted a mass exodus of refugees, which a leading Catholic bishop described as a Way of the Cross that could become a genocide unless the global community intervenes.   “They are facing a human catastrophe and risk a real genocide. They need water, food, shelter,” Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako of Babylon said in an Aug. 7 open letter.
“We appeal with sadness and pain to the conscience of all, and all people of good will and the United Nations and the European Union, to save these innocent persons from death,” he said. “We hope it is not too late!” His letter follows the fall of the city of Qaraqoush to forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant – known as ISIS – on Wednesday night. The town was one of Iraq’s largest Christian towns until the Kurdish military forces known as the Peshmerga withdrew from it.