Backed Kurdish Fighters Enter Sinjar In Northern Iraq

Hours into Thursday’s operation, the Kurdish Regional Security Council said its forces controlled a section of 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.

About 7,500 Kurdish special forces, peshmerga and Yazidi fighters have joined the fight.

It said the peshmerga had secured a Sinjar silo, cement factory, hospital and several other public buildings.

ISIS overtook Sinjar previous year in August.

“We promised, we have liberated Sinjar”, Massoud Barzani, the president of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, told fighters in Sinjar. As the day wore on, Kurdish soldiers spotted more ISIS militants on the move, and scrambled into position.

U.S.-backed coalition airstrikes paved the success. These are part of over 250 strikes that happened over the past month in northern Iraq.

The coalition carried out 24 strikes against IS in the Sinjar area Wednesday and another eight across the border in Syria’s Al-Hol area.

Dug in on the mountainside, Kurdish forces searched for targets, passing the coordinates back to USA advisers.

Warplanes in the U.S.-led coalition have been striking around Sinjar ahead of the offensive and strikes grew more intense at dawn Thursday as bombs pounded targets outside the town. They also sought to cut off an east-west highway used by the group to funnel fighters and supplies between the Syrian city of Raqqa and Mosul, its defacto capital in Iraq. The northern Iraqi town is a key junction in the ISIS supply line.

A US drone strike targeted a vehicle in Syria believed to be transporting the masked Islamic State militant known as “Jihadi John” on Thursday, according to American officials. “And now the Iraqi forces are moving on Ramadi”, he said. We have the will to fight, we have the determination to fight. “That is exactly the strategy today and it is working – to a degree – not as fast as we would like, perhaps, but we are making gains”.

Colonel Steve Warren, spokesman for the global operation against IS, told AFP that: “Today, they’ll continue the attack… and they’re gonna push on closer to Sinjar”.

“The airstrikes woke us up”, says BuzzFeed’s Mike Giglio, who spent the night sleeping on Mount Sinjar, which overlooks the town.

Up to 800 IS militants are estimated to be holed up in Sinjar, but Kurdish officials said a few had fled overnight as Kurdish forces pounded the town and called in United States airstrikes on IS positions.

“There was no resistance – I mean zero”.

Maraq said he hopes ISIS will be defeated and his family can return home.

Retired Lt. Col. Rick Francona, a CNN military analyst, agreed that the fight in Sinjar would be slow going.