Kurdish Forces Retake Strategic Highway in Iraq’s North From ISIS
Last edited Thu Nov 12, 2015, 01:11 PM - Edit history (1)
Source: New York Times
Kurdish forces aided by thousands of lightly armed Yazidi fighters captured a strategic highway on Thursday in northern Iraq in the early stages of an offensive to reclaim the town of Sinjar from the Islamic State, which seized it last year and murdered, raped and enslaved thousands of Yazidis.
As many as 7,500 Kurdish pesh merga fighters were moving on “three fronts to cordon off Sinjar City, take control of ISIL’s strategic supply routes, and establish a significant buffer zone to protect the city and its inhabitants from incoming artillery,” the security council of the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq said in a statement, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
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United States-led coalition air forces pounded the area overnight in preparation for the offensive. As the campaign got underway, long columns of pesh merga vehicles, including pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles and a small number of armored vehicles, snaked their way across Mount Sinjar as airstrikes boomed in the distance.
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The operation, which comes as the American-led coalition is trying to regain the initiative in the struggle with the Islamic State, holds out the possibility of progress along a new front in northern Iraq. The Obama administration has been under pressure to show that it has a workable strategy for defeating the Islamic State, and it is looking to the successful prosecution of this offensive as a first step.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/13/world/middleeast/sinjar-isis-iraq-syria.html?_r=0
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