No Caliphate in Iraq will be Allowed, says President Obama

President Barack Obama clarified in an interview that the United States was not interested in being "the Iraqi Air Force" but was ready to get more involved in Iraq if the government followed more inclusive policies. He also reiterated that the US will not allow the militants to create a caliphate in Iraq and Syria

"We're not going to let them create some caliphate through Syria and Iraq," the president said in an interview with Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times . "But we can only do that if we know that we have got partners on the ground who are capable of filling the void."

President Obama ordered air strikes in Iraq Thursday, as fears of the Islamist State taking complete control of the Kurd region in Iraq became clear.

The capital of the Kurdish region, Irbil, is a hub for US oil firms and the center of operations for the US in Iraq.

President Obama said that he ordered airstrikes after concluding that a genocide in the Kurdish region needed to be prevented, where the IS militants were butchering minorities and to bolster a clearly panicked Iraqi government.

The president clarified that the Iraqi leaders should understand that "the cavalry is not coming to the rescue" with ground forces, reports the New York Times.

Obama's administration has been very weary of interfering in thorny foreign policy issues after facing tremendous losses in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

"So that's a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, 'Should we intervene militarily?'" Obama said in the interview. "Do we have an answer the day after?"

Obama also expressed concerns about the escalating tensions in Gaza and Ukraine.

He believes that brokering a peace between Israel and Palestine will be hard this time as  the leadership on both sides was not willing and there was no statesman like  Anwar Sadat of Egypt to see it through.

He also said that he did not see President Putin of Russia backing out of the Ukraine conflict.