Syrian aircraft bomb militant targets inside Iraq

Syrian government aircraft bombed Sunni militant targets inside Iraq on Tuesday, further broadening the Middle Eastern crisis a day after Israeli warplanes and rockets struck targets inside Syria.

Iraqi state media initially reported that the attacks near Iraq's western border with Syria were carried out by U.S. drones, a claim that was forcefully denied by the Pentagon.

Separately, the Pentagon said that 90 additional U.S. troops arrived in Iraq, part of a group of up to 300 military advisers that President Obama said last week he would deploy to assess the situation before taking any further U.S. military action. A statement said that U.S. aircraft were now flying 30 to 35 manned and unmanned daily surveillance flights over Iraq.

The main U.S. effort Tuesday was on the diplomatic front, as Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to Irbil, the Kurdish regional capital, to urge leaders there to remain part of Iraq. As they met, fighters from local Sunni tribes, apparently working with militant fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, wrested control of at least part of Iraq's largest oil refinery from government troops.

"We are facing a new reality and a new Iraq," Massoud Barzani, president of the semiautonomous Kurdish government, told Kerry.

An independent country is a long-held goal for many in Iraq's Kurdish minority, numbering about 6.5 million. Some Kurdish leaders see an opportunity in the rapid advance of the insurgents and the slow, disorganized response by the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Throughout his visit to Iraq, including in talks with Maliki and Sunni leaders in Baghdad, Kerry has argued that Iraq risks collapsing unless a new governing coalition representing all sects and ethnicities is quickly formed.

That argument is harder to make in the Kurdish region, which has several vast oil fields and a long history of at least partial self-rule. The Kurds also have their own defense force, the pesh merga, separate from the Iraqi military that largely melted away in the face of advancing ISIS forces.

This month, as the militants overran the northern city of Mosul and headed south, pesh merga forces quickly secured the oil capital of Kirkuk, which lies just outside the official regional borders but which Kurds have long demanded be included in their territory.

U.S. officials traveling with Kerry, who arrived late Tuesday in Brussels for a NATO meeting, said that he had raised the question of possible Kurdish secession during his hour-long session with Barzani, but that most of their discussion focused on strategy to form a new Iraqi government.

In an interview, Kerry was asked about Barzani's "new reality" remark.

"A united Iraq is a stronger Iraq, and our policy is to respect the territorial integrity of Iraq as a whole," Kerry told NBC. "President Barzani understands that" and will participate in the government formation process, he said. Iraq has until Monday to form a new parliament following elections in April; parliament will then choose a new government.

The United States has long feared that formation of an independent Kurdistan in present-day Iraq would not only weaken Iraq but also set off secession attempts or civil war in neighboring nations with Kurdish minorities.

Meanwhile, Iraqi news media reported that at least 20 people were killed and 93 injured in the strike by Syrian jets in an Iraqi border town controlled by ISIS. Western officials who confirmed the attack said they had no casualty details on the strike, which targeted a market in the town of Qaim, according to the nongovernment National Iraqi News Agency.

On Monday, Israeli warplanes and rockets struck nine targets, including what the Israel Defense Forces said was a Syrian command headquarters, in retaliation for a missile attack from Syria on Sunday that killed one Israeli in the Golan Heights.