Kurdish forces set for battle to retake Iraq’s Sinjar from IS

ARBIL: Kurdish forces are massing in northwest Iraq for an offensive to retake the town of Sinjar from IS militants who overran it more than a year ago, killing and enslaving thousands of its Yazidi residents and triggering US-led air strikes.

Sinjar is a symbolic and strategic prize sitting astride the main highway linking the cities of Mosul and Raqqa - IS’s bastions in Iraq and Syria. In December 2014, Kurdish forces drove IS from north of Sinjar mountain, a craggy strip some 60km (40 miles) long, but the radical insurgents maintain control of the southern side where the town is located. Villagers along a main road to the mountain reported seeing dozens of military transport vehicles packed with Kurdish peshmerga fighters pass in recent days.

Preparations for the offensive have been complicated by rivalry between various Kurdish and Yazidi forces in Sinjar.

Peshmerga officials declined to comment on the operation, but a Kurdish security source said it would begin once the weather improved and intelligence-gathering had been completed.

Challenge

The challenge, he said, would be to defend the town after it is re-captured because the offensive will open up new fronts with the militants, who have declared a medieval-style caliphate spanning parts of Iraq and Syria.

The US-led coalition against IS has carried out 57 air strikes in Sinjar over the past two weeks in support of the peshmerga, apparently coordinated with the planned offensive.

Authorising the first strikes against the group in August 2014, US President Barack Obama cited a duty to prevent a genocide of Yazidis by IS. The peshmerga in Sinjar are mainly affiliated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which is accused of seeking to monopolise power by other groups arrayed against IS.

Many Yazidis lost faith in the KDP when its forces failed to protect them from IS militants who attacked Sinjar in August 2014 and systematically slaughtered, enslaved and raped thousands of them.