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Kurdish Peshmerga
fighters have fought their way to Iraq's Sinjar Mountains where hundreds of
people have been trapped for months by fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant (ISIL) group, a Kurdish official has said.
"Peshmerga forces
have reached Mount Sinjar, the siege on the mountain has been lifted,"
Masrour Barzani, head of the Iraqi Kurdish region's national security
council, told reporters from an operations centre near the border with Syria
on Thursday.
The assault, backed by
US-led air strikes, ended the months-long ordeal of hundreds of people from
Iraq's Yazidi minority, who had been besieged on the mountain since ISIL
stormed Sinjar and other Kurdish-controlled parts of northern Iraq in August,
he said.
"All those Yazidis
that were trapped on the mountain are now free," Barzani said, but added
that the Peshmerga had not yet begun to evacuate them.
He said 100 ISIL fighters
had been killed - a claim that could not be independently verified.
Kurdish Peshmerga
soldiers began their offensive on Wednesday to break the Sunni armed group's
siege of the mountain and the town of Sinjar.
Lieutenant General James
Terry, head of the US-led campaign against ISIL, said more than 50 air strikes
in recent days "have resulted in allowing those [Kurdish] forces to
manoeuvre and regain approximately 100 square kilometres of ground" near
Sinjar.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon
said on Thursday that US strikes had killed several top ISIL leaders.
"I can confirm that
since mid-November, targeted coalition air strikes successfully killed
multiple senior and mid-level leaders," Rear Admiral John Kirby. the
Pentagon spokesman, said.
US
officials said among those killed was Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, who was Baghdadi's
deputy in charge of Iraq and would be the most senior ISIL leader to fall
this year.
The
capture of Sinjar by ISIL fighters and the plight of the mostly Yazidi
population there was cited by President Barack Obama as one of the reasons
for the US military intervention in Iraq.
Al
Jazeera's Sue Turton, who is in Iraq, reports about the recent gains by the
Kurdish fighters and their significance
- What
do we know for certain about what's happening on the ground?
There
was a military build-up of Peshmerga forces. We drove through right from the
Sinjar Mountains across the length of northern Iraq two nights ago, and we
saw the build-up of military hardware, with various troops along that route.
However,
it wasn't an enormous amount of military build-up and this is why we have to
be slightly cautious because Masoud Barzani, president of Iraq's Kurdistan
region, and the Peshmerga are saying in Erbil that 8,000 Peshmerga are pushed
a distance of 700sq/km from Zumar, which is south of the Mosul Dam area all
the way into the Syrian border.
They're
taking towns and villages that ISIL has controlled for a long time along the
way. They're saying that they've taken the mountain range next to Tal Afar,
which is where the main ISIL military base is. They say that they can now
shoot down on that military base.
Indeed,
they've even stretched along the three mountain ranges all the way to the
main Sinjar Mountains, which is where we were just a few days ago. This area
remains besieged now since the summer, and the ISIL fighters have really been
pushing on for many weeks.
The
Peshmerga have been telling us that they're running out of ammunition and
that they're really on the backfoot.
So to
say that they have managed to take this whole ground is an extraordinary
achievement if indeed it is the case.
But I
think we should also question as to where ISIL fighters have gone to. They
say they've killed over a 100 ISIL fighters but that begs the question if
ISIL has really just disappeared into the communities and has sort of pulled
back into Mosul city and is really waiting or laying siege until they want to
reappear and strike back.
·
Why are the Sinjar Mountains important?
The
Sinjar Mountains area is strategically important because it is right on the
border, at a high position. The ISIL fighters have been trying very hard in
all the towns around the foot of the mountain and pushing up near the main
ravine, near the top of the mountain. They know if they hold that high ground
they can fire down on any Peshmerga or Iraq force.
Of
course, for the Yazidi volunteer force, it's much more personal. They have
seen that their community has been ravaged by ISIL fighters over the summer
when many had to be airlifted off that mountain top. There are 10,000 still
on that mountain.
The
Yazidi forces have told us in the past few days that the fight is personal
and they want to take back the land that they've been living on for
centuries.
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