PARIS — Breaking ranks with other European countries, France announced on Wednesday that it would send arms to the embattled Kurdish authorities fighting Sunni militants who have encircled members of the Yazidi religious minority on a remote mountaintop in northern Iraq.

“In order to respond to the urgent needs expressed by the Kurdistan regional authorities, the president has decided, in agreement with Baghdad, to deliver arms in the coming hours,” President François Hollande said in a statement from his office.

The population of Iraqi Kurdistan was facing a “catastrophic situation,” the statement said, but it did not go into precise detail about the nature of the weaponry to be delivered.

Kurdish pesh merga fighters are facing militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, who have shown off an array of captured weaponry, including tanks, after their push across the border from Syria. They have taken over swaths of territory in Iraq, pressing south toward Baghdad and east toward the Kurdish region of Iraq.

President Hollande’s readiness to position himself alongside the United States in offering military support recalled his actions last year when he joined with President Obama in threatening Syria with airstrikes after the use of chemical weapons in the civil war there. The strikes never happened after the United States and Russia brokered a deal to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons program, but France nonetheless seemed to supplant Britain as America’s main European ally in Middle East military ventures.

In a reminder of those actions, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a United Nations watchdog, said on Wednesday that 581 tons of precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of the nerve gas sarin had been destroyed aboard the Cape Ray, a specially-equipped United States vessel in the Mediterranean, after being removed from Syria earlier this year.

Mr. Hollande also noted his support for Iraq’s designated new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, and called for the quick establishment of a unity government capable of repelling advances by ISIS fighters. Even as the plight of the Yazidis has grabbed global attention, the political elite in Baghdad has been locked in a stalemate over demands for the replacement of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

The French announcement came a day after the European Union failed to establish a common policy among its 28 members concerning arms supplies, but concluded that individual states could, in agreement with Baghdad, send weapons to the pesh merga forces.

The French move also coincided with what seemed to be the gathering pace of American efforts to evacuate thousands of Yazidi people trapped on Mount Sinjar, possibly by establishing a humanitarian corridor. The mountainous area lies in inhospitable terrain close to the border with Syria.

In Brussels, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said on Wednesday that she was ready to hold a meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers this week or next week to discuss events in Iraq, as well as the crises in Ukraine and Gaza. France and Italy had been pressing for the gathering, but it was not immediately clear when, or if, it would be held.

In London, Prime Minister David Cameron cut short a holiday in Portugal on Wednesday to return home as the British authorities faced a mounting drumbeat of calls for stronger military action in northern Iraq.

Earlier, Britain announced plans to send a small number of Chinook helicopters and transport military equipment supplied by other countries to Kurdish fighters in the American-led campaign against Sunni militants, officials said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/wo...-aid.html?_r=0


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