CANBERRA, Australia—Australia will step up airstrikes against Islamic State, allowing its military for the first time to attack support facilities as well as militant fighters.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in a major security speech to Parliament on Thursday, said the conservative government had agreed to new rules of engagement requested by the military, amending domestic laws that restricted strikes to only front-line Islamic State units.
“We must combat all of Daesh, including its financiers and propagandists,” Mr. Turnbull told lawmakers, using the government’s preferred term for Islamic State extremists. “It is why we must give our agencies the powers they need. To detect. To disrupt. To arrest. And to target,” he said.
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Australia, a close U.S. ally, has since 2014 committed combat aircraft and army special-forces advisers to the fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as well as refueling, early warning and control aircraft.
But U.S. warplanes have been attacking a wider range of ISIS targets because of restrictions in Australian domestic laws than created some ambiguity around who could be defined as a militant fighter. That meant airstrikes weren’t being carried out against so-called “Mad Max technicals”—armed sport-utility vehicles not clearly identified as belonging to militant groups—and supply dumps.
“The government has reviewed its policy on targeting enemy combatants,” Mr. Turnbull said. “This means ADF [Australian Defence Force] personnel will be supported by our domestic laws. They will be able to target Daesh at its core, joining with our coalition partners to target and kill a broader range of Daesh combatants.”
In April, U.S. commanders redrafted rules of engagement to allow airstrikes on ISIS even when there was some risk of civilian casualties, as coalition allies tried to capitalize on air and ground offensives that have seen Islamic State lose territory.
Mr. Turnbull said Islamic State and the inspiration it provided for homegrown terrorism was the greatest strategic threat faced by Australia, which has begun a A$200 billion modernization of its military to counter a buildup of weapons in Asia and increasing territorial assertion by China.
‘We must give our agencies the powers they need. To detect. To disrupt. To arrest. And to target.’
—Australia Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull
“We live in an uncertain and complex strategic environment, from territorial disputes in the South China Sea, to Middle East conflicts, tensions on the Korean Peninsula and instability in parts of Africa, broken borders in Europe,” he said.
But he said that Australia—one of the largest coalition military contributors—was confident the “tide had now turned” in the Middle East fight against Daesh after Iraq’s military defeated Islamic State in the key city of Fallujah, in the strategic Anbar province, on June 26. Coalition strategists, he said, believed Islamic State had lost close to half of the territory it once held in Iraq and about 20% of its territory in Syria, as well as losing around a third of its front-line fighters. CONTINUE AT SITE
