Iraqi Kurd Chief States Sinjar Seized from IS

The recapture of Sinjar, located on the main supply road between IS-held cities in Syria and Iraq, could help open the path to Mosul, whose sudden seizure past year prompted IS to declare a caliphate.

According to a report from CNN, the encounter was more intense than the one in Kobani, a Syrian border town which has been reclaimed from ISIS militants earlier this year after four months of persistent fighting.

Imran Khan, a reporter for Al Jazeera in the Sinjar region, said the Kurdish peshmerga fighters walked into the border town nearly unchallenged. It contained 78 elderly women’s bodies, the Sinjar director of intelligence Qasim Samir, said.

Two mass graves have been discovered near the town since it was secured: one to the east of the city and another to the west. They are yet to be excavated, but based on witness testimony, one is thought to contain about 24 bodies and the other 76, said Sinjar’s mayor, Mahma Khalil.

 The attacking force also included 440 PKK-trained members of the area’s Yazidi community, thousands of whom were forced to flee to mountains overlooking Sinjar when the town was seized in August 2014 by IS militants; they subsequently slaughtered between 500 and 2,000 Yazidis caught in the city. The jihadists have a reputation for using women as sex slaves – bought, sold and dumped.

The gains against the Islamic State are the latest sign that the group, which won a series of victories in a stunningly rapid offensive in Iraq past year, is now on the defensive.

The militants rounded up and killed Yazidi men and boys, many executed by point-blank shots to the head or simply pushed off cliffs, according to eyewitness accounts. However, she is not alone.

‘In other areas that have been taken back, we have found similar mass graves’.

Detailed information about the grave is unavailable now because the surrounding area is believed to be filled with homemade bombs, preventing investigators from reaching it, Samir said. Since then, thousands of people in the minority Yazidi communty have been displaced; thousands more killed, and its women, including young girls, enslaved, brutally tortured and raped. Many families still hold out hope that their loved ones will return; however, residents say the situation looks worse as more mass graves are uncovered.

‘But now with the news of each grave found, we know not all of them will come back, ‘ he said. “We have seen ISIL when they are on the back foot fight back quite hard in the past”. French fighter jets bomb ISIS in Syria.

Obama has faced criticism from Republicans over the United States’ foreign policy, including in civil war-torn Syria.