Europe

Home page

Europe

Italy to send 4 tornado aircraft to support anti-ISIS coalition

17 November 2014 18:43 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Italy will send four tornado aircraft to support the international coalition in the ongoing fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), local reports said on Monday, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

The four aircraft will not take part in the bombings but will be deployed within the end of December in Kuwait's military bases to support the coalition, Italian military sources were quoted by ANSA news agency as saying.

In a recent interview with La Stampa newspaper, Italian Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti said Italy was asked by the U.S.-led coalition and by the local authorities to give more support to the anti-ISIS fight.

The four aircraft will be disarmed and will have "advanced reconnaissance and surveillance" tasks, Pinotti was quoted by Il Sole 24 Ore economic newspaper as saying.

The Five-Star Movement (M5S), an opposition force in the Italian parliament, complained however that the government's decision to send four tornado aircraft was equal to going to war.

"Italy is actually going to war," members of the M5S, a grass-roots formation which gained more than 25 percent of the national vote in last year's general election, were quoted by ANSA as saying.

The M5S members said Pinotti has authorized the mission without asking parliamentary permission, and therefore "both the Italian parliament and citizens were completely in the dark."

They said the Italian government had only approved last August the shipment to Iraqi of "small automatic weapons and relative ammunition."

Nicola Latorre, who heads the Senate defense committee, hit back stressing that the four aircraft "will not actively take part in the conflict."

"They will support a very rigorous activity of intelligence," he said.

The head of the Italian defense, admiral Luigi Binelli Mantelli, described the intelligence work as a "very delicate" task in a phase in which "the ISIS forces have increasingly gained ability to hide troops and weapons in hospitals, schools and mosques."

"Thus it is decisive to intervene rapidly and with effective strategies in order to avoid that civilians are damaged," he explained in an interview with Il Sole 24 Ore.