Updated 02:33 p.m. Moscow Time
PARIS, September 19 (RIA Novosti) – France's Air Force has carried out its first attack against the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group, the office of the French President Francois Hollande said Friday in a press release.
"This morning at 9:40 [07:40 GMT] our Rafale aircraft conducted a first strike against a logistic depot of the terrorist from the Daech [the Islamic State, IS] organization in the North-East of Iraq. The task has been achieved and [the facility] was entirely destroyed," the statement reads.
The French president's press service added that more military operations would be carried out over the next few days.
On Thursday, Hollande ruled out the possibility of Paris deploying ground troops to Iraq in order to fight IS militants, but authorized airstrikes. France also sent arms and military instructors to Iraqi Kurdistan in order to help the Kurdish Peshmerga militia withstand the IS' advance.
France's move came after the address to the nation by US President Barack Obama last week, in which he vowed to defeat the IS and announced the creation of a broad international coalition to combat the terrorists.
Obama also said he would not hesitate to sanction anti-IS airstrikes in Syria. The US-led campaign has been joined by more than 40 nations.
The IS, also locally known as Daech, an Arabic acronym standing for the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, is a jihadist group, which started to fight the Syrian government in 2012. In 2014, it launched an offensive on Iraq, seizing vast areas and proclaiming an Islamic caliphate on the territories it controls across Iraq and Syria.
