ROUGH CUT (NO REPORTER NARRATION)
U.S. President Barack Obama said on Thursday (August 14) that the Islamist militant siege of Iraq's Mount Sinjar had been broken and most of the U.S. military personnel sent to assess the situation would be pulled out of Iraq in the coming days.
Obama, in a briefing to reporters, said he did not expect the United States to have to stage an evacuation of the mountain, where thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority had been trapped by militants, or to continue humanitarian airdrops.
"We broke the ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) siege of Mount Sinjar," Obama said. "We helped vulnerable people reach safety and we helped save many innocent lives. Because of these efforts we do not expect there to be an additional operation to evacuate people off the mountain and it's unlikely that we are going to need to continue humanitarian airdrops on the mountain."
"The majority of the military personnel who conducted the
