WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama said he was willing to consider broader use of military strikes in Iraq to beat back Islamic State militants, but Iraqi political leaders must first figure out a way to work with each other, the New York Times reported.

“We’re not going to let them create some caliphate through Syria and Iraq,” Obama said in the interview, excerpts of which the Times posted on its website late on Friday.

On Friday, US warplanes bombed IS fighters marching on Iraq’s Kurdish capital after Obama said Washington must act to prevent “genocide.”

Islamic State fighters, who have beheaded and crucified captives in their drive to eradicate unbelievers, have advanced to within a half hour’s drive of Arbil, capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region and a hub for US oil companies.

They have also seized control of Iraq’s biggest dam, Kurdish authorities confirmed on Friday, which could allow them to flood cities and cut off vital water and electricity supplies.

The Pentagon said two F/A-18 aircraft from an aircraft carrier in the Gulf had dropped laser-guided 500-pound bombs on the fighters’ artillery and other air strikes had targeted mortar positions and an Islamic State convoy.

Obama authorized the first US air strikes on Iraq since he pulled all troops out in 2011, arguing action was needed to halt the Islamist advance, protect Americans and safeguard hundreds of thousands of Christians and members of other religious minorities who have fled for their lives.

For the second straight night, the United States also dropped relief supplies to members of the ancient Yazidi sect, tens of thousands of whom are massed on a desert mountaintop seeking shelter from fighters who had ordered them to convert or die.

“Earlier this week, one Iraqi in the area cried to the world, ‘There is no one coming to help’,” said Obama in a late night television address to the nation on Thursday. “Well, today America is coming to help.”

“We can act carefully and responsibly to prevent a potential act of genocide,” he said. On Friday the White House said the strikes would last as long as the security situation required.

IS fighter: ‘God is with us…”

The Islamic State was defiant. A fighter told Reuters by telephone the US air strikes would have “no impact on us.”

“The planes attack positions they think are strategic, but this is not how we operate. We are trained for guerrilla street war,” he said. “God is with us and our promise is heaven. When we are promised heaven, do you think death will stop us?“

Sunni fighters from the Islamic State, an Al-Qaeda offshoot rejected as too extreme by Osama Bin Laden’s successors, have swept through northern Iraq since June. Their advance has dramatically accelerated in the past week when they routed Kurdish troops near the Kurdish autonomous region in the north.

The advance of the IS militants, who also control a third of Syria and have fought this past week in Lebanon, has sounded alarm across the Middle East and threatens to unravel Iraq, a country divided between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

A US official told Reuters the Iraqi government had provided a planeload of ammunition to Kurdish fighters in Arbil, in what the official called an “unprecedented” act of military cooperation between Baghdad and the Kurds, who have long feuded over land and oil.

The US air strikes prompted renewed calls on jihadi online forums for attacks on the United States and oil interests in the Gulf. “The mujahideen must strive ... to discipline America and its criminal soldiers,” the SITE monitoring service quoted one such message, on the Shumukh Al-Islam jihadi forum, as saying.

In Baghdad, where politicians have been paralyzed by infighting while the state falls apart, the top Shiite cleric all but demanded Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki quit, a bold intervention that could bring the veteran ruler down.

‘Trample our dead bodies’

In the Kurdish capital, suddenly near the front line for the first time after a decade of war, defiant residents said they were stockpiling weapons and prepared to defend the city.

“People with children took them to their families (outside Arbil), but the men have stayed,” said Abu Blind, 44, working at a tea stall in Arbil bazaar. “They will have to trample over our dead bodies to reach Arbil.”

The Kurdish region has until now been the only part of Iraq to survive the past decade of civil war without a serious security threat. Its vaunted “peshmerga” fighters — those who confront death — also controlled wide stretches of territory outside the autonomous zone, which served as sanctuary for fleeing Christians and other minorities when Islamic State fighters arrived in the region last month.

But the past week saw the peshmerga crumble in the face of an advance by the fighters, who have heavy weapons they seized from Iraqi army troops that abandoned their posts in June. In addition, the fighters are flush with cash looted from banks.

Christians, many of them already refugees who had sought shelter in peshmerga-controlled areas, were suddenly forced to flee. Tens of thousands of Christians fled on Thursday when the Islamic State overran their hometown, Qaraqosh.

Shamil Abu Madian, a 45-year-old Christian, told Reuters he had first quit the city of Mosul when it fell in June. He initially sheltered in a town protected by the peshmerga, but was forced to flee again in panic in the middle of the night when the Kurdish peshmerga troops suddenly vanished.

“We were not able to take anything with us except some clothes in a nylon bag,” he said. “People are living on sidewalks, in public gardens, anywhere.”

A UN humanitarian spokesman said some 200,000 people fleeing the Islamists’ advance had reached the town of Dohuk on the Tigris River in Iraqi Kurdistan and nearby areas of Nineveh province. Tens of thousands had fled further north to the Turkish border, Turkish officials said.

Regrets over Russia, China

In the wide-ranging interview the interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on Friday, Obama said he wants the US to do more to help Iraq but the country’s political leaders must find a way to cooperate with each other.

“But we can only do that if we know that we have got partners on the ground who are capable of filling the void,” he said.

He praised officials from Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region for being “functional” and “tolerant of other sects and religions” and said the United States wanted to help.

“But, more broadly, what I’ve indicated is that I don’t want to be in the business of being the Iraqi air force,” he said.

Obama also expressed regrets over not doing more to help Libya, pessimism about prospects for Middle East peace, concerns that Russia could invade Ukraine, and frustration that fellow economic superpower China has not stepped up to help.

Obama has faced growing criticism for being too reluctant to intervene in thorny foreign policy issues which have piled up under his watch.

He quipped that he sometimes wished the United States was more like China: a superpower that no one expects to intervene.

“They are free riders, and they’ve been free riders for the last 30 years, and it’s worked really well for them,” Obama said.

He told the Times that he regretted his government did not do more to help rebuild Libya after NATO-led air strikes in 2011 that toppled Muammar Qaddafi. The nation has been wracked by fighting and chaos.

“So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene militarily?’” Obama said. “Do we have an answer the day after?“

Obama’s administration has also been trying to encourage cease-fires in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinians, and applying economic sanctions against Russia to try to get Moscow to stop supporting separatists in eastern Ukraine.

He expressed doubts about whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas could come to the kind of longer term peace deal that former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was able to broker, and that former Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin accepted.

“In some ways Bibi’s too strong, in some ways Abbas is too weak to bring them together and make the kind of bold decisions that a Sadat or a Begin or a Rabin were willing to make,” Obama said.

Obama said he feared that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not back down from eastern Ukraine, where Moscow has supported separatists.

“He could invade,” Obama said.