Iraqi Kurds break months-long ISIL siege of Mount Sinjar

Major advance comes amid reports that US-led airstrikes killed top aide of ISIL leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.

Masrour Barzani, head of the Iraqi Kurdish region’s national security council, speaks to reporters on the front line in the province of Dohuk on December 18, 2014, a day after peshmerga fighters launched an offensive against ISIL in northern Iraq. Ari Jalal / ReutersShow less

ERBIL, Iraq // Kurdish forces on Friday pressed their biggest offensive against ISIL so far, buoyed by reports that the top aide in Iraq to Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the extremist group’s chief, had been killed.

Peshmerga forces were securing the surroundings of Mount Sinjar after breaking the militants’ months-old siege of the north-western region while fighting was also reported near the city of Tall Afar farther east.

In Washington, the Pentagon announced that US strikes had killed several top leaders of the group that proclaimed a “caliphate” straddling Syria and Iraq six months ago and rose to be the world’s most feared extremist organisation.

“I can confirm that since mid-November, targeted coalition airstrikes successfully killed multiple senior and mid-level leaders,” spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said late on Thursday.

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.

Adm Kirby said strikes against the group’s leadership were disrupting its “ability to command and control current operations against” Iraqi federal and Kurdish forces.

The leaders of autonomous Kurdistan described the operation they have spearheaded since Wednesday as the most successful so far against ISIL.

After the US-led coalition paved the way with about 50 airstrikes, around 8,000 peshmerga reclaimed some 700 square kilometres in the Zumar and Sinjar regions in two days.

Late on Thursday they reached Mount Sinjar, where thousands of fighters and civilians from the Yazidi minority had been besieged for months.

“The peshmerga have liberated around 70 per cent of the areas around Mount Sinjar, but the southern part of the Sinjar region is still under ISIL control,” said Faisal Saleh, a Yazidi stranded on the mountain with his family.

“The peshmerga are currently offering assistance to those who need it the most and they are planning to take them to Kurdistan but that hasn’t happened yet,” he said by telephone.

Most of the displaced civilians still atop the mountain were from a nearby village called Sinuni, and peshmerga forces were escorting them there.

“We’re clearing areas north of Mount Sinjar and not facing any resistance. Our forces are now about one kilometre from Sinuni,” said Ashty Kojar, the peshmerga commander on the mountain.

A Yazidi fighter on Sinjar said earlier he could see retreating ISIL fighters blow up houses in Sinuni and Khan As-Sur.

In August, Mount Sinjar saw one of the most dramatic episodes of the six-month-old conflict in Iraq when tens of thousands of Yazidis were trapped there without food or water.

Fears of a genocide against the small Kurdish-speaking minority were one of the reasons the US president Barack Obama put forward for starting an air war against the jihadists.

The peshmerga also closed in on Tall Afar, a large city from which huge numbers of Shiite Turkmen were displaced when ISIL attacked in June.

“There is continuous shelling by the peshmerga. It is likely they will move a bit closer,” said one Tall Afar official, adding that the Kurdish troops were 13 kilometres north of the city.

Residents said the Iraqi army’s elite counterterrorism unit – known as the Golden Brigade – was also involved in operations around the city.

“There’s fighting going on, it started last night. I can hear shooting and explosions not that far away even as we speak. I can sometimes hear fighter jets,” said Abu Hussein, a 26-year-old who was a teacher before the ISIL offensive.

“Where I live, in the Kasek neighbourhood of Tall Afar, I can see many ISIL members preparing to flee the city,” he said.

According to the US military, two of the five airstrikes by coalition warplanes on Thursday targeted ISIL vehicles near Tall Afar.

The Iraqi portion of ISIL-held territory has shrunk in recent weeks, with central government troops and Shiite militia making significant gains in the east of the country and south of Baghdad.

Kurdish officers have said the latest peshmerga-led operation forced many ISIL militants to seek refuge across the Syria border or in their main hub of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, around which they have been building berms and trenches.

* Agence France Presse