Volunteer Yazidi fighters, including men as old as 70, joined Kurdistan’s peshmerga and special forces, and Kurdish separatist fighters based in Syria in the offensive for a total of about 7,500 fighters. US officers have openly urged Iraqi commanders to launch an offensive to retake the Islamic State-held city of Ramadi in the west. But the city, abandoned when the Iraqi soldiers defending it fled their posts in May, is still in the Islamic State’s grip.
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If Emwazi was killed, he would be the latest in a string of significant Islamic State and Khorasan Group figures tracked and killed in a joint effort by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command.
“I am here to announce the liberation of Sinjar”, Barzani told a news conference near the town on Friday. “Today we took revenge for every Yazidi”.
They encountered minimal resistance during the push, Maj Ali said. The 75-mile-long highway has been one of the most active supply lines for ISIS, a major conduit for goods, weapons and fighters.
Gunfire fell silent as peshmerga fighters marched into the town.
He said the situation in the town was still unsafe, however, and warned it was too soon to declare victory.
“We will stay here until Sinjar is completely safe”, he said.
The recapture of Sinjar from IS came as evidence grew that the group had suffered another setback with the probable death in an air strike in northern Syria of Jihadi John, a Briton who had appeared in videos showing the beheadings of American and British hostages.
Sinjar has been pounded by US-led air strikes and Kurdish artillery fire targeting Isis positions, which sent massive columns of smoke drifting up from the town on Thursday. “Bombs are widespread in houses”, Saeed said, adding that a few 20 tonnes of explosives were found in a bomb-making factory, while they also discovered 20 barrels of explosives. An earlier attempt to retake Sinjar, at the foot of Sinjar Mountain about 30 miles (50km) from the Syrian border, stalled in December and militants have since been reinforcing their ranks. Militants have since been reinforcing their ranks.
“The main supply route to Sinjar goes through al Houl”, said Xelil, a spokesman for the Kurdish YPG militia.
Sinjar is also where tens of thousands of ethnic minority Yazidis were trapped when the extremists seized control in 2014, triggering the U.S.-led campaign of airstrikes against the group, its first military operation in the country since USA troops withdrew in 2011. Its members follow an ancient faith that the Islamic State group considers heretical.
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Kurdish and Yazidi fighters have regained control of Sinjar driving the ISIL occupiers out. “There can’t have been more than 20 Daesh left in the town”, said a fighter from the unit attached to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two main political parties in the autonomous Kurdish region.
