A Kurdish Sinjar offensive is underway as Iraqi Kurdish forces have launched a huge attack against ISIS in Sinjar to get the city back. The Kurdish Regional Security Council announced Thursday that several thousand Peshmerga fighters were heading there to try to cut off one of the ISIS militants’ important supply lines, and that several thousand Yazidi fighters have joined them.
Sinjar very significant target for Kurdish Sinjar offensive
The town of Sinjar is a very significant target due to the fact the city is part of the disputed territories that both the central government and the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region have claimed.
ISIS captured the city last summer, which is about an hour away from Erbil, the Kurdish capital.
Sinjar is located on the southern face of Mount Sinjar, a place where a humanitarian crisis occurred in August 2014 and thousands of ethnic Yazidis escaped into the mountains to get away from ISIS. Their plight of being stuck on the mountain is why the U.S. started humanitarian aid and began air strikes against ISIS.
Kurds retake part of key highway during fighting
Local Al Jazeera News reported that U.S.-led coalition planes had bombed ISIS targets Wednesday night before the Kurdish Sinjar offensive started, which they are calling Operation Free Sinjar. The Peshmerga soldiers are said to control about 20 percent of Sinjar now, and the AP reporters put out that there was a small group of U.S.
forces on a hill confirming air strikes. These were done to support the ground fighting, and 24 air strikes are reported to have hit nine ISIS strategic units, as well as their staging areas, and to have destroyed 27 fighting locations and some weapons and bunkers. These are part of over 250 strikes that happened over the past month in northern Iraq.
The Kurdish Regional Security Council says the Peshmerga fighters have captured Highway 47, which is a strategic road near Sinjar and part of a. supply route that runs between Mosul and ISIS’ de facto capital city of Raqqa in Syria
The Kurdish Sinjar offensive is said to have successfully taken part of the key highway from ISIS in northwestern Iraq, as the over 7,500 Kurdish fighters were able to complete part of their mission to get back Sinjar.
Iraqi state television has also reported that the Kurdish fighters have managed to reach the mayor's office in the center of the city.
The main objective of the Kurdish Sinjar offensive is to get control of the strategic supply routes of ISIS, and then institute a major buffer zone so as to protect the town and its residents from incoming weaponry.