Kurdish fighters backed by United States launch assault on IS

“Operation Free Sinjar will include up to 7,500 Peshmerga from three fronts to cordon off Sinjar city, take control of ISIL’s strategic supply routes and establish a significant buffer zone to protect the city and its inhabitants from incoming artillery”, the council statement said.

“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”.

Peshmerga fighters are seeking to cut off one of the savage regime’s most active supply lines, Highway 47, which passes by Sinjar.

“Actually it’s going very slow”, he said. The progress was hampered by explosives and roadside bombs, a favored weapon of the IS group in Iraq.

The massacre of thousands of Yazidis by Islamic State militants in and around Sinjar in August 2014 prompted the United States to begin airstrikes against IS in Iraq and form an global coalition that is helping Peshmerga and Iraqi government forces battle the extremist group.

Kurdish forces and the U.S. military said the number of IS fighters in the town had increased to almost 600, after reinforcements arrived in the run-up to the offensive, which had been expected for weeks but delayed by weather and friction between various Kurdish and Yazidi forces in Sinjar.

The group, which is Kurdish but whose faith is linked to ancient Mesopotamian religions, suffered intense persecution at the hands of IS, who regard Yezidis as heretics.

Peshmerga forces from Iraq’s Kurdish region seized control of the governor’s office of Sinjar district Thursday in an extensive military operation against ISIL, according to the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

Eminki asserted that no PKK terrorist group militants participated in the operation and the Peshmerga only received support from the global coalition. 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 numerous remaining displaced Sinjaris to escape.

But the road also carries badly needed supplies to the 1.5 million people who still live in Mosul, where prices are rising and activists report hunger.

Kurdish peshmerga fighters outside of Sinjar, Iraq in August, 2015.

And this month, the tempo of airstrikes against ISIS positions in and around the town has picked up.