ISIL a terrorist army: Australian PM

“What we’ve got to appreciate” is that the ISIL “is not just a terrorist group, it’s a terrorist army and they’re seeking not just a terrorist enclave but effectively a terrorist state, a terrorist nation,” Abbott said Monday, speaking to ABC radio from the Netherlands.
 
The comment came after Khaled Sharrouf, an Australian man who fled to Syria last year and is now an ISIL militant, posted a picture on his Twitter account showing his seven-year-old son struggling to hold up the severed head of a slain Syrian soldier by his hair. “That’s my boy,” Sharrouf said in the caption of the photo.
 
Australia issued an arrest warrant for Sharrouf, who served almost four years in prison after pleading guilty over a 2005 conspiracy to carry out an attack in Sydney.
 
Canberra says up to 150 Australians have joined the ISIL terrorist group fighting in Syria and Syria.
 
    Abbott further said that the ISIL Takfiri group “does pose extraordinary problems... not just for the people of the Middle East but for the wider world.”
 
    “And we see more and more evidence of just how barbaric this particular entity is,” he added. 
 
Abbott also said that his country would likely join efforts to conduct humanitarian airdrops and even airlifts of endangered civilians threatened by ISIL in northern Iraq.
 
“Australia will gladly join the humanitarian airlift to the people stranded on Mount Sinjar, this is a potential humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.
 
US President Barack Obama has ordered the Pentagon to carry out airstrikes against the ISIL militants in northern Iraq.
 
The ISIL has taken several towns since it intensified its attacks in Iraq in mid-June. The Iraqi army is engaged in fierce fighting with the militants to push them out of the captured areas.