“Until now, we defused 45 bombs and a auto bomb”, said Sulaiman Saeed, a member of the autonomous Kurdish region’s peshmerga forces who works in explosives disposal. It was also possible that they could be biding their time before striking back.
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USA and Kurdish officials estimate there were 500 to 600 Islamic State fighters in and around Sinjar at the start of the Peshmerga operation, including foreign fighters recently sent in as reinforcements.
The offensive south of the Kurdish city of Hasakeh was launched on October 30 with the joint Arab-Kurdish force taking control of several villages before the capture of Al-Hol, which had been under IS rule since previous year.
Islamic State extremists overran Sinjar as they rampaged across Iraq in August 2014, leading to the killing, enslavement and flight of thousands of people from the minority Yazidi community.
Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, told a news conference near the northern town: “I am here to announce the liberation of Sinjar”. One 9-year-old Yazidi girl says she was raped by 10 different militants before becoming pregnant.
“The final status will be determined, but we believe that Sinjar, out of appreciation of what they have suffered and endured, we hope that we will be able to turn it into a governorate”.
The huge task remains of clearing Sinjar of bombs planted by Isis remains, and there is also the possibility of holdout jihadist fighters, who have kept up attacks even after other areas in Iraq were said to have been retaken.
The fight to dislodge IS militants from the Kurdish town of Kobani in northern Syria, meanwhile, took about four months – despite hundreds of US airstrikes in support of the Kurdish fighters.
“The Sinjar operation will remind the key decision makers in Baghdad that the USA has a broader sense of strategic cooperation with the Kurds than with Baghdad”, said Ayham Kamel of the political consultancy organization Eurasia Group, according to The NY Times.
In the Sinjar area itself, the operation severed vital supply routes used by IS to move fighters, weapons and oil and other illicit commodities that provide funding for its self-proclaimed caliphate.
It was the biggest victory for the Syrian coalition, which was formed in mid-October.
Agence-France Press reported early on Friday that a Kurdish military leader announced that the city had been “liberated”.
The Iraqi town is the heartland of the Yazidi people, and was seized by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in August a year ago in a slaughter that prompted global alarm.
A security official with the Kurdish militia forces known as peshmerga also confirmed the discovery of the mass graves.
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A Pentagon spokesman said the United States was “reasonably certain” Mohammed Emwazi (his real name) had been killed in Thursday’s attack in Raqqa. Officials were assessing the results of the strike, he said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.
