The offensive is receiving support from the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition.
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The success of the Sinjar drive is the latest sign that Isis, which won a series of victories in a stunningly rapid offensive in Iraq past year, is now on the defensive.
“I am here to announce the liberation of Sinjar”, Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani told a news conference near the town. One 9-year-old Yazidi girl says she was raped by 10 different militants before becoming pregnant. “We will never forget what they did here, and we will have our revenge”.
They encountered minimal resistance during the push, Maj Ali said. “We have seen ISIL when they are on the back foot fight back quite hard in the past”.
Civilians appeared to have fled the town before the operation began.
“I expect that about 15 to 20 more graves will be discovered”, said Qasim Simo, head of security in Sinjar. The risks include ambushes from suicide bombers, roadside bombs and booby-trapped houses, he added.
Iraqi Kurdish forces were working to clear bombs planted by the Islamic State group in Sinjar, where a grave believed to hold dozens of the jihadists’ victims was found today.
There is reason for officials’ caution. Militants have since been reinforcing their ranks.
The Islamic State group captured Sinjar during its rampage across northern Iraq in the summer of 2014 and killed and captured thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority, including women forced into sexual slavery. The extremist Islamic State group, which claims to adhere to Sunni Islam, considers them heretics.
US President Barack Obama justified the country’s air campaign against IS militants in the area previous year by invoking the duty to prevent a Yazidi genocide.
Nouri Said, the commander of a Yezidi unit of the Kurds’ peshmerga forces, says the forces will “remove the barriers along the front line” and move into the town.
USA forces are backing the Kurdish factions in an ongoing offensive meant to cut off the two cities from one another, in preparation for the ultimate objective of retaking them with the help of local ground forces.
The Kurdistan Region’s Security council said 28 villages had been taken during “Operation Free Sinjar” and more than 200 sq km freed from militant control.
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.
Homemade roadside bombs and explosives-laden cars targeting peshmerga convoys significantly slowed Thursday’s advance through Sinjar’s eastern and western fringe.
The blasts continued Friday. Just an hour after the first Kurdish forces entered Sinjar, an Associated Press team saw an explosion 700 metres (yards) from the northern edge of town.
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“What we have not yet been able to do is completely decapitate their command and control structures”, he said in part of the interview that aired on ABC’s “Good Morning America” program.
