Friday 13 November 2015

Islamic State 'Defeated And On Run' In Sinjar

                         Sinjar
town on Friday morning.
Kurdish militia fighters, known as peshmerga, launched a major offensive to retake Sinjar and cut off a key highway on Thursday.


US-led coalition airstrikes supported the offensive, dubbed Operation Free Sinjar.
"ISIL defeated and on the run," the Kurdistan regional security council said in a tweet, using an acronym for Islamic State.
Airstrike on Sinjar Iraqi town captured by Islamic State 1
It said the peshmerga had secured a silo, a cement factory, a hospital and several other public buildings.
Major Ghazi Ali, who oversees one of the units involved in the offensive, said thousands of Kurdish fighters entered the town from three directions and encountered minimal resistance.
He said the situation in the town was still dangerous, however, and warned it was too soon to declare victory.
Colonel Steven Warren, a spokesman for the US-led coalition, confirmed only that peshmerga fighters raised their flag on grain silos in the eastern part of the town.
Sky's Sam Kiley joined the patrols in Sinjar and said IS "took a pounding".
He added that volunteers from the town's Yezidi population, which had been slaughtered, raped, and enslaved when IS took it last year, joined the final push.
Who's Fighting Who?
Kurdish fighters have been attempting to sever IS's primary line of communication between Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.
The aim is to stop terrorists from being able to channel equipment and fighters into Iraq.
The jihadist group still controls almost a third of the country despite growing pressure on a number of fronts in Syria.
The success comes as a leading British member of IS and three other foreign militants are thought to have been killed in US-led air strikes in Raqqa,
Mohammed Emwazi, who has appeared in a number of beheading videos and become known as 'Jihadi John', is reported to have died in a drone strike on a vehicle in which he was travelling.

No comments:

Post a Comment