Updated
The leader of the Kurds in Iraq has pleaded for arms shipments to fend off onslaught from extremist Islamic State (IS) militia, who are accused of burying women and children alive.
United States officials have warned IS is a direct threat to the US, and other western nations, and is more powerful now than Al Qaeda was when it struck the US on September 11, 2001.
The US forces have continued airstrikes against IS targets in northern Iraq as political friends and foes criticise president Barack Obama's decision to limit American action in the country.
US military aircraft have also dropped relief supplies to up to 50,000 Yazidis who have gathered on Mount Sinjar, seeking shelter from the insurgents.
Iraqi officials on Sunday said at least 20,000 members of the Yazidi ethnic minority are now safely off a mountain, where they had been trapped without food or water for several days after fleeing the advance of IS militants.
However, Iraq's human rights minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani revealed "striking evidence" obtained from Yazidis fleeing Sinjar that up to 500 Yazidis were killed by IS militants.
"Some of the victims, including women and children were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around Sinjar," Mr Sudani said.
Mr Obama over the weekend launched a campaign of US air strikes and humanitarian air drops in northern Iraq, where militants are threatening religious minorities and encroaching on Erbil, the capital of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region and the site of a US consulate and a US-Iraqi joint military operations centre.
Some US consulate staff were evacuated from the Kurdish capital on Sunday, the State Department said.
The strikes, launched by drone aircraft and US fighter jets, were aimed at protecting Kurdish peshmerga forces as they face off against Islamist militants near Erbil, the US military's Central Command said.
It said US aircraft struck and destroyed an IS armed truck that was firing on Kurdish forces near Erbil. Four other strikes followed on armed trucks and a mortar position.
Kurdish president Masoud Barzani says the extremists threatening Erbil are not a terrorist organisation, but a terrorist state.
He told visiting French foreign minster Laurent Fabius that his peshmerga militia is outgunned by the IS fighters and the Kurds want their allies to ship them new weapons.
Mr Fabius said France will consult other European countries about arranging a supply of "equipment that will allow them to defend themselves and to counterattack".
Kurdish officials say US airstrikes have allowed the peshmerga to recapture two small towns south-west of Erbil.
Meanwhile, Mr Obama's former counter-terrorism head Michael Leiter also issued a dire warning about IS.
"This is now the biggest terrorist organisation we've ever seen with the most control, with the most money, getting more and more recruits," he said.
Clinton says US should have done more to stop IS militants in Syria
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has blamed the rise of IS on failures of US policy under Mr Obama as political opponents called on the president to take more aggressive action against the militants.
Ms Clinton specifically faulted the US decision to stay on the sidelines of the insurgency against Syria's president Bashar al-Assad as opening the way for the most extreme rebel faction.
"The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad - there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle - the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled," Ms Clinton told the Atlantic.
Ms Clinton, widely considered an undeclared presidential candidate, was an unsuccessful advocate of arming the Syrian rebels when she was secretary of state during Mr Obama's first term.
She was interviewed before the US president's decision on Friday to order limited air strikes to check an IS offensive into Kurdistan, which threatened US nationals and facilities and sent thousands of refugees fleeing into the mountains.
One of the reasons why I worry about what's happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States
Hillary Clinton
Ms Clinton, however, suggested in the interview that Mr Obama lacked a strategy for dealing with the jihadist threat.
"Great nations need organising principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organising principle," she said, referring to an Obama slogan.
She said the US must develop an "overarching" strategy to confront Islamist extremism, likening it to the long US struggle against Soviet-led communism.
"One of the reasons why I worry about what's happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States," she said.
"Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d'etre is to be against the West, against the crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank-and we all fit into one of these categories.
"How do we try to contain that? I'm thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat."
Obama's response to IS advance 'very ineffective': McCain
Senator John McCain, a leading Republican voice on foreign policy who ran against Mr Obama for the presidency in 2008, called for air strikes not only in Iraq but also in Syria against IS forces.
"They have erased the boundaries between Iraq and Syria," Senator McCain told CNN.
This is turning into - as we predicted for a long time - a regional conflict which does pose a threat to the security of the United States of America.
Senator John McCain
He said he would be providing "as much training and equipment as I can" to the Kurds and rushing equipment to Erbil.
"This is turning into - as we predicted for a long time - a regional conflict which does pose a threat to the security of the United States of America," Senator McCain said, calling Mr Obama's response to the Iraqi crisis "clearly very, very ineffective, to say the least".
Senator McCain said IS militants have attracted "young men from around the world" to fight on their side, with the movement "metasticising" throughout the region.
Democrat senator Ben Cardin, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, backed Mr Obama, saying: "We are not going to get in the middle of a civil war and use (the) American military where it should Iraqis taking care of their own needs."
Senator Richard Durbin, a democrat, said the US should be trying to prevent genocide in Iraq, while also helping Kurds protect their capital.
But he said ultimately the Iraqi government should provide security for its people, and that the US should not step up its use of military force.
"Only Iraq can save Iraq," Senator Durbin said, adding it would be "a challenge" to get Congress to back more than limited military strikes.
ABC/wires
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, world-politics, government-and-politics, terrorism, iraq, united-states, france, syrian-arab-republic
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