President Obama said today that Kurdish and Iraqi forces have retaken the Mosul Dam in Iraq, a decaying, dangerous structure that, with or without brutal extremists in charge, threatens millions of people downstream.
Earlier today Gen. Karim Fatah, commander of a Kurdish peshmerga battalion near the dam, told ABC News Kurdish troops had retaken key parts of the dam from the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) but the battle was ongoing. The Iraqi military followed with a similar statement. The U.S. military said it conducted more than a dozen airstrikes today in support of the Kurdish and Iraqi troops.
Just over an hour before the president spoke, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department said only that there had been "progress around the dam" and that the operation was "ongoing."
President Obama is the highest level official to say without equivocation that the U.S.-backed forces had retaken the dam - calling it a "major step forward."
ISIS managed to take control of the dam last week, an eventuality about which a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department had previously said the U.S. government was "extremely concerned."
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