AAP
Iraqi Kurdish forces backed by US-led air strikes have blocked a key Islamic State group supply line with Syria as they fought to retake the town of Sinjar from the jihadists.
A permanent cut in the supply line would hamper IS’s ability to move fighters and supplies between northern Iraq and Syria, countries where the jihadists hold significant territory and have declared a “caliphate”.
Re-taking Sinjar – where IS carried out a brutal campaign of killings, enslavement and rape against the Yazidi minority, members of which are now battling for the town – would also be an important symbolic victory.
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Kurdish “peshmerga units successfully established blocking positions along Highway 47 and began clearing Sinjar,” the US-led coalition said on Thursday, referring to the main route linking IS’s Iraqi hub of Mosul to Syria.
The autonomous Kurdish region’s security council (KRSC) also said the highway had been cut, and that several villages near Sinjar were retaken.
“The attack began at 7am and the peshmerga forces advanced on several axes to liberate the centre of the Sinjar district,” Major General Ezzeddine Saadun told AFP.
Huge columns of smoke rose over Sinjar as coalition strikes and Kurdish shelling targeted IS positions.
Up to 7500 Kurdish fighters are to take part in the operation, which aims to cordon off Sinjar, seize IS supply routes “and establish a significant buffer zone to protect (it) and its inhabitants from incoming artillery,” the KRSC said.
“Coalition warplanes will provide close air support to peshmerga forces throughout the operation,” it said.
The forces fighting for Sinjar face an estimated 300 to 400 jihadists in the town, Captain Chance McCraw, a US military intelligence officer, told journalists in Baghdad.
But it is not just the fighters that are a danger: IS has had more than a year to build up networks of bombs, berms and other obstacles in Sinjar.
Multiple explosives-rigged vehicles have been hit by coalition air strikes, while the peshmerga destroyed another with a MILAN anti-tank missile, the KRSC said.
“This is part of the isolation of Mosul,” Iraq’s second city, Colonel Steve Warren, spokesman for the international operation against IS, said of the campaign.
“Sinjar sits astride Highway 47, which is a key and critical resupply route” for IS, Warren said in Baghdad.
“By seizing Sinjar, we’ll be able to cut that line of communication, which we believe will constrict (IS’s) ability to resupply themselves, and is a critical first step in the eventual liberation of Mosul.”