Kurdish troops recapture Iraq town of Sinjar from Islamic State

They encountered minimal resistance during Friday’s push, Ali said.

“We are waiting on the engineering team”, he said, referring to the teams of peshmerga who specialize in diffusing explosives.

Speaking to ARA News in Shingal, the officer in the Ministry of Peshmerga, Major Saeed Bakri, said that the Peshmerga forces were able Thursday to recapture key points in the area, west of Mosul, pointing out that liberating Shingal is aimed at cutting major ISIS supply lines between western Mosul and Tal Afar. Thousands of Yazidi minorities fled to Mount Sinjar – the very mountain peshmerga are now using as staging ground to retake its namesake city.

The coalition carried out 36 strikes against jihadists in the Sinjar area on Wednesday and Thursday, and 15 more across the border in Al-Hol, where Syrian Kurdish forces and their Arab allies are battling Isis.

The victorious forces then immediately sealed off Highway 47, a vital supply route linking ISIL held Mosul in Iraq to the movements de facto capital Raqqa in Syria.

The Kurds and Shi’ite militias are seen as critical forces in the fight against the insurgents, who control a third of Iraq and large parts of neighbouring Syria.

“When you go into Sinjar proper it’s nearly like a ghost town”, adds Kesling. Barzani and his KDP face an opposition crying foul on corruption and waste, months without pay for civil servants and peshmerga, and the president overstaying the constitutional limits of his term.

Made up of fighters from both the Kurdish peshmerga and from the Yazidi religious minority that was forced to flee Sinjar under threat of genocide previous year, the force will now have to deal with booby traps and mines that ISIS is assumed to have left in the town.

Most Yazidis have since been displaced to camps in the Kurdistan region, but several thousand remain in Islamic State captivity.

The groups’ intervention bolstered its standing in the Kurdish nationalist movement compared to Barzani and the KDP.

Relief: Children smile and clap on learning Sinjar had been liberated. PKK forces complained about KDP media control over the narrative and Barzani’s taking all the credit.

“Aside from the Kurdistan flag, no other flag will rise in Sinjar”. “It’s time for the Yazidi girls to hold their heads up”. However, US and Kurdish military officials urged caution in declaring outright victory over the extremist group in the major offensive to retake the strategically important city. Peshmerga forces also penetrated Sinjar, joining other fighters noisily cocking their rifles and patrolling its rubble-covered streets.

Baghdad, which has long opposed Kurdistan’s desire to incorporate a swathe of disputed northern territory, is unlikely to welcome that.