The town was overrun by the extremists as they rampaged across Iraq in August 2014, leading to the killing, enslavement and flight of thousands of people from the minority Yazidi community.
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Rudaw reports that “dozens of ISIS militants were killed in the operation and their bodies left in the field”.
The two-day offensive took back the town after more than a year of Isis control, during which time its ethnic Yazidi inhabitants were killed or driven out. “But we do have confidence in the Iraqi Kurdish forces there who have shown their capability in the past”.
The discovery of the graves followed a U.S.-backed operation last week by Iraqi Kurdish militiamen known as peshmerga who wrested control of the town from Islamic State.
Located near the newly-liberated Iraqi town of Sinjar, the mass grave contains the bodies of up to 60 Izadi men, women and children, Sinjar’s director of intelligence Qasim Samir said on Sunday.
“We are absolutely confident that over the next days Sinjar will be able to be liberated”, Mr Kerry said on a visit to Tunisia.
Diar Namo, the 26-year-old deputy commander of the Peshmerga unit stationed there, said the skies above Sinjar were largely quiet overnight following intense coalition air strikes on Thursday.
The lightning assault, which also involved fighters from the Yazidi minority that IS has brutally targeted in the Sinjar area, began on Thursday morning.
Mass graves containing more than 130 victims of an Isis-led genocide have been found.
“There are still people resisting the Peshmerga”, he reported.
“We want to show that this will be our revenge on ISIS”, Bakir adds on the proposal to upgrade Sinjar’s status.
Most of Iraq’s Yazidi population are still living in camps in the Kurdistan region, and more than 2,000 women remain in the Islamic State group captivity.
The offensive is receiving support from the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition.
Heavy bursts of gunfire could be heard inside the town, as fighters filed down the hill overlooking the town from the north, a few with rocket-propelled grenades on their shoulders, a Reuters witness said. The group captured the provincial capital in May in the largest defeat for the Baghdad government since the fall of Mosul in June previous year.
“We expect that the ISIL forces will be dug in, will have placed defensive measures, put those in place to try and hold this ground”, said Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook. That has not happened. ‘Some of them are never coming back’.
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“We saw more than 50 Daesh (fighters) flee overnight”, he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. In holding Sinjar, the Peshmerga could effectively choke off a a crucial ISIS supply line, weakening the terrorist group throughout the region.
