Iraqi Kurdish fighters celebrate win over ISIS
U.S. bombing campaign that helped free Sinjar is a welcome boost for Obama
SINJAR, IRAQ— For the first time in more than a year, Sinjar was free Friday from the Islamic State group, whose fighters fled a combined onslaught of American air power and Kurdish ground troops.
But hundreds of the city’s former residents who rushed to Sinjar’s outskirts in hopes of seeing their homes once again were barred from entry, as the new Kurdish occupiers worried about the hundreds of improvised explosive devices that the Islamic State fighters had left behind.
For reporters allowed in briefly with Kurdish troops, the force of coalition air power was apparent throughout the streets of Sinjar. More than 250 airstrikes had hit ISIS positions in the city over the last month, with homes and hospitals lying in ruins.
Islamic State forces were nowhere in evidence. By dawn Friday, only a handful of snipers and aspiring suicide bombers remained to greet the official forces of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government and guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party — the infamous PKK that Turkey considers a terrorist group — when they took control of the city.
It was a rare victory in the battle against ISIS in Iraq, and it represented the closing of a circle. It was the Islamic State’s capture of Sinjar, and the plight of the thousands of Yazidis who’d fled into the nearby hills to escape, that prompted U.S. President Barack Obama to order the start of the American bombing campaign.
Coupled with word from Washington that a U.S. drone strike likely had killed the black-garbed British jihadist who’d beheaded westerners in grisly videos, it was also a needed boost for Obama’s flailing policy of keeping American ground troops out of the anti-Islamic State campaign, which critics have called ill-conceived and ineffective.
“ISIL defeated and on the run,” the Kurdistan regional security council said in a tweet, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
Almost as soon as the Kurdish government declared the town secure at 10:20 a.m. local time, hundreds of displaced Yazidis who’ve been living in refugee camps nearby began pushing to return home. The peshmerga fighters closed the roads to block the human flood, explaining that it could be months before technicians would be able to neutralize the improvised bombs, mines and unexploded coalition munitions that cover the area.
Other uncomfortable questions loom in the coming months. Masoud Barzani, Iraqi Kurdistan’s president, made a dramatic appearance on the outskirts of the town, where he held a news conference and declared that Sinjar would henceforth be considered a part of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s area of control. It was a warning to the PKK that it would not be allowed to rule here and a stunning slap at the Iraqi central government in Baghdad, which until the Islamic State’s capture of the town in August 2014 had been the authority here.
“Only the flag of the Kurdish Regional Government will fly over Sinjar,” Barzani said through microphones placed on a wall of sandbags, with Sinjar still burning in the distance.
The operation had been delayed as Barzani’s peshmerga troops and the PKK and its allies bickered over who would take the lead and the credit for the success, as political discussions took precedence over military preparations.
But on Friday there was little evidence of tension between the Kurdish factions on Sinjar’s rubblestrewn streets. Flags of all factions flew from destroyed buildings, and fighters often assumed to be bitter rivals mingled happily in the badly damaged city.
“This is my city and it has been returned to us,” said one resident who described himself as the unofficial mayor of the town, claiming allegiance to the PKK. “Daash might have come from America, but America and the Kurds have removed it,” he added, using a common Arabic term for the Islamic State.
“Obama and his bombs, the Kurds and their courage, and the Yazidis and their dignity freed Sinjar,” said a local Yazidi farmer who identified himself as Hajj Mohammed and who had arrived at the scene carrying a Second World War-era rifle. “We will now destroy Daash from the entire world,” he pledged.