A fierce U.S.-led air campaign is taking the fight to the heart of the Islamic State’s supply line. Airstrikes are being called in by American special forces ground units, and are leading Kurdish fighters as they launch a ferocious assault Thursday aimed at retaking the strategic town of Sinjar, which the Islamic State has controlled for the last year.
Just hours into the operation, the Kurdish Regional Security Council said forces were in control of a section of Highway 47, of one of ISIS’s most active supply lines, completely isolating Sinjar from militant strongholds in Syria and northern Iraq. The Kurdish fighters also said they had secured the villages of Gabarra, on the western front, and Tel Shore, Fadhelya and Qen on the eastern front.
Some 7,500 peshmerga fighters were closing in on Sinjar from three fronts, the security council said in a statement. In addition to taking the town and the highway, Operation Free Sinjar aimed to establish “a significant buffer zone to protect the city and its inhabitants from incoming artillery.”
Heavy gunfire broke out early Thursday as peshmerga fighters began their approach amid aerial bombardment. An Associated Press team saw a small American unit at the top of a hill along the front line calling in and confirming airstrikes.
The coalition said 24 airstrikes were carried out over the past day, striking nine militant tactical units, nine staging areas and destroying 27 fighting positions, among other targets.
“(Peshmerga) troops are holding their position, waiting for reinforcements and more airstrikes so they can then move into the center of the town. Airstrikes have been very important to the operation getting to the point where it is now,” said Maj. Gen. Seme Busal, commander of one of the front lines.
Sinjar was captured by the Islamic State group in August 2014 shortly after the extremists seized Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and blitzed across northern Iraq.
The major objective of the offensive is to completely cut off Highway 47, which passes by Sinjar and indirectly links the militants’ two biggest strongholds — Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in northern Iraq — as a route for goods, weapons and fighters. Coalition-backed Kurdish fighters on both sides of the border are now working to retake parts of that corridor.
“If you take out this major road, that is going to slow down the movement of (ISIS’s quick reaction force) elements,” Capt. Chance McCraw, a military intelligence officer with the U.S. coalition, told journalists Wednesday. “If they’re trying to move from Raqqa over to Mosul, they’re going to have to take these back roads and go through the desert, and it’s going take hours, maybe days longer to get across.”
Iraqi state television said Kurdish peshmerga also reached the Sinjar mayor’s office, though Kurdish officials did not immediately confirm it.
Warplanes in the U.S.-led coalition have been striking around Sinjar ahead of the offensive and strikes grew more intense at dawn Thursday.
Sinjar, located at the foot of Sinjar Mountain about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the Syrian border, is not an easy target. One attempt by the Kurds to retake it stalled in December. The militants have been reinforcing their ranks in Sinjar recently in expectation of an assault, though the U.S.-led coalition was not able to give specifics on the size of the IS forces.
“On the radio we hear (ISIS) calling for reinforcements from Syria,” Rebwar Gharib, a deputy sergeant on the central front line said Thursday.
The Islamic State group inflicted a wave of terror in the Sinjar area against the minority Yazidi community, members of an ancient religion whom the Islamic State group views as heretics and accuses of worshipping the devil. An untold number were killed in the August 2014 assault, and hundreds of men and women were kidnapped — the women enslaved and given to militants across the group’s territory in Iraq and Syria, many of the men believed killed, others forced to convert.
Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled into the mountains, where the militants surrounded them, leaving them trapped and exposed in the blazing heat. The crisis prompted the U.S. to launch air drops of aid to the stranded, and then on August 8, it launched the first round of airstrikes in what would mark the beginning of a broader coalition effort to battle the militant group in Iraq and Syria.
Some of those stranded on Mount Sinjar were rescued by Syrian Kurdish fighters, who cleared a path for the Yazidis to descend from the mountain, cross into Syria, then cross back into northern Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous zone. Then, in December, Kurdish fighters in northwestern Iraq managed to drive the militants out of areas on the other side of the mountain, opening a corridor that helped many of the remaining Sinjaris to escape. Those Kurdish fighters then tried to advance into Sinjar town itself but were fought off by the militants.
Various Kurdish militias on the town’s edge have been fighting guerrilla battles for months with ISIS, damaging or destroying much of the picturesque town of ancient, narrow streets lined with modest stone homes. The factions include the Turkey-based Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), the Syria-based People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Yazidi-led forces billing themselves as the Sinjar Resistance. Iraqi Kurdish fighters have also held positions further outside the town.
The Associated Press contributed to this article
What have they been doing for all this time? People, especially Christians have been brutally oppressed. For years the U.S. and the large European nations did little to help these people.
We should have been doing this from the get go. Obama and Sec. of State Clinton and now Kerry, have let this terrorist crap get a toe hold. Had they stopped it in the beginning it would not have become such a problem. If you are weak, the hole quickly fills.
They prefer hugging and talking,,
Why now? Is this a diversion to get American’s minds off the unraveling of the Obama’s administration? An example of this might very well be the MU event that surely is not going according to plan? Just like the Ferguson event, where investigation resulted in establishing the perpetrator was indeed the perpetrator. It is entirely possible most racist events are caused by racist trying to exert their racist attitude to provoke the police?
Hopefully the U.S. and Kurds will be able to wipe out many of the ISIS members. Let’s see, ISIS has beheaded some of their captives, burned a few alive, blown up some with an RPG while they were chained inside a car, drowned them a cage full at a time, and blown their heads off with an explosive string wrapped around the victims’ necks. Hopefully the captured ISIS members will be dispatched to Allah with the same amount of brutality as they provided their prisoners.
Eye for a eye
A tooth for a tooth,
As General Patton once said! We don’t take prisoner we use them for grease on our tank tread,!,,
screw air strikes, use Neutron bombs and wipe everyone out and save the structures for the Pershmegas to use:) they are limited range weapons. As an alternative: high explosive and napalm bombs. Use en masse on each target. go for extermination. We are dealing with savages, treat them as savages. That is how they regard the world. Then work out way to Germany and exterminate there as well.
The U.S. air strikes, coming at this late date, are in competition with the Russians. Putin is the leader in this campaign.
Obama created the ISIS and protects them, supports them with weapons, food etc. to fight the Assad regime and the american armed forces have to go along with it and they are being praised for it. The worst is that the american liberal media supports that and stands behind Obama, the No. 1 Terrorist and destroyer of the United States.
Really, Otmar, you should go back to your coloring books and leave the deep thinking to those people with a few brain cells.
What will OBOOOOMA – the magnificent FARCE – do to hurt his ISLAMIC BROTHER HOOD BUDDIES . ??????????
WAIT AND SEE WHAT VLADIMIR PUTIN does to these BARBARIAN MUSLIM SLOBS – who brought down that plane with a bomb loaded by MUSLIMS at the EGYPT air port ????????????????????????????????/
Rick: see Otmar.