On Wednesday evening, moments after finishing a summit meeting with African leaders at the State Department, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff delivered a stark message to President Obama as they rode back to the White House in Obama's limousine.
The Kurdish capital, Erbil, once an island of pro-American tranquillity, was in the path of rampaging Sunni militants, the chairman, Gen Martin E Dempsey, told the president. And to the west, the militants had trapped thousands of members of Iraqi minority groups on a barren mountaintop, with dwindling supplies, raising concerns about a potential genocide.
With American diplomats and business people in Erbil suddenly at risk, at the American Consulate and elsewhere, Obama began a series of intensive deliberations that resulted, only a day later, in his authorising airstrikes on the militants, as well as humanitarian airdrops of food and water to the besieged Iraqis.
Looming over that discussion, and the decision to return the US to a war Obama had built his political career disparaging, was the spectre of an earlier tragedy: the September 2012 attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador J Christopher Stevens, and has become a potent symbol of weakness for critics of the president.
As the tension mounted in Washington, a parallel drama was playing out in Erbil. Kurdish forces who had been fighting the militants in three nearby Christian villages abruptly fell back, fanning fears that the city might soon fall. By Thursday morning, people were thronging the airport, desperate for flights out of town.
"The situation near Erbil was becoming more dire than anyone expected," said an administration official, "We didn't want another Benghazi."
For weeks, intelligence officials had been watching the militant group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, gain in strength, replenishing its arsenals with weapons captured both in Syria and in Iraq. But interviews with multiple officials at the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies paint a portrait of a president forced by the unexpectedly rapid deterioration of security in Iraq to abandon his longstanding reluctance to use military force.
Obama, in a speech late Thursday announcing his decision, insisted this was not a return to war - that Iraq's fate still ultimately rested in the hands of its three main groups, the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. But he made clear he would take action to protect Americans in Erbil and Baghdad.
His decision to order F-18 fighter jets from the aircraft carrier George H W Bush to carry out bombing raids on militants dramatically raises the risks for Obama. Unlike other times when he has made the decision to commit American forces - the 2009 troop surge in Afghanistan, for example - Obama acted within hours.
Six thousand miles away, in Erbil, Thursday morning broke with news that two towns just 27 miles west of the Kurdish capital, Mahmour and Gwer, had fallen to the militants, and that Kurdish fighters, known as pesh merga, had withdrawn.
In villages and small towns outside the city, even places well north of Erbil and farther from the militant forces, people were frantically piling into cars to flee. The pesh merga were helping to evacuate hundreds of people in large flatbed trucks.
Americans officials on the ground said they feared if Erbil emptied, the city would be vulnerable to a militant attack. And if it fell, they feared, not only would Americans be at risk, but it would be a second seismic event for the region - after the June 10 fall of Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city - with dangerous consequences for Turkey and a potential for enormous loss of life in Kurdistan.
As if that were not enough, the militants had seized a critical dam in Mosul, which controls water levels on the Tigris River as far south as Baghdad. The capture of the dam shook Kurdish officials and fuelled the sense of crisis during Thursday's meetings, with officials worried that the militants could either blow it up or use it to cut off water supplies or as a bargaining chip in negotiating anything they wanted.
At a 90-minute meeting in the Situation Room on Thursday morning, Obama was briefed again about the plight of the Iraqis stranded on Mount Sinjar. Members of an ancient religious sect known as Yazidi, they were branded as devil worshipers by the militants. The women were to be enslaved; the men were to be slaughtered.
Officials told Obama there was a real danger of genocide, under the legal definition of the term. "While we have faced difficult humanitarian challenges, this was in a different category," said an official. "That kind of shakes you up, gets your attention."
Obama did not announce the operations until dawn had broken in Iraq, a delay of several hours that added to the panic in Erbil.
American officials said the US was closely coordinating with the Iraqi Air Forc. Struggling to stanch the fear, keep the fighters at their posts and slow the exodus out of the city, Kurdish officials put out a series of brave-sounding but misleading statements.
Kurdish prime minister Necherven Barrzani sent a letter to Kurdish citizens, posted on a government website, saying: "The pesh merga are going ahead and terrorists are being beaten. Don't be sceptical."
Also writing a letter to the Kurdish people was Kosrat Rassoul, deputy to President Massoud Barzani, who said: "There are rumours among the people, which make citizens feel sceptical. Here I want to reassure everyone we in Erbil are ready in the best way to defend the Kurdish territory."
What they did not say was that the pesh merga were demoralised, uncertain, underequipped and facing a formidable foe along several hundred miles of border between the Kurdistan region and Iraq's Nineveh and Kirkuk Provinces, where the militants are now the dominant force.
Several fighters who had fought ISIS said they were daunted when they discovered the militants were travelling in bulletproof vehicles that left the pesh merga's bullets doing little more than pockmarking the metal.
"It's our business to see the faces of the soldiers and know how they feel," said Halgurd Hekmat, the head of media for the peshmerga fighters. "I wouldn't say they were afraid, but they were a bit nervous," he admitted. Since the fall of Mosul, the pesh merga leadership had warned the Americans and the Iraqi government they were ill equipped to hold the militants at the border separating Nineveh Province from Kurdistan.
"We told them: 'We cannot hold it for very long. We are not a country; we don't have an army; we don't have aircraft,' " said Lt Gen Jaber Yawer Manda, the secretary general of the pesh merga ministry. "I said: 'We are fighting in the front lines now. You have to help us.' "
On Thursday evening, after a long day in the West Wing, Obama had a message for Iraqis: "Today, America is coming to help."
©2014 The New York Times News Service
