Kurds, Americans Liberate Sinjar

Kurdish troops and American coalition forces launched an offensive strike to liberate the northern Iraqi region of Sinjar from occupation by the group known as the Islamic State (IS).   Sinjar is home to a majority of the ethno-religious group known as the Yazidis, who practice a monotheistic religion and have been a persecuted minority throughout their history. IS forces captured the city in August 2014, unleashing a wave of mass violence, rape, and enslavement now referred to as the Sinjar Massacre. The massacre was one of the militants’ first publicized acts of violence that spurred U.S. President Barack Obama to form the coalition against IS.

The offensive to recover Sinjar began on November 11 when 7,500 Peshmerga troops attacked the IS stronghold. The U.S.-led coalition coordinated with the Peshmerga forces and used airstrikes to back the Kurdish ground offensive. Al Jazeera reported hundreds of Yazidis and Kurdish troops loyal to the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) also joined the fight of their own accord.

Between four hundred and six hundred IS militants were stationed in Sinjar before the assault. According to Col. Steven Warren, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, coalition airstrikes killed approximately two hundred IS troops during the battle and Kurdish troops killed several hundred more in combat on the ground. After a day of fighting, the remaining IS militants retreated from the city and Kurdish and American troops regained control of the city.

The Kurds arrived to discover mass graves containing the bodies of thousands of Yazidis murdered by IS during its year-long occupation of Sinjar. Much of the city had been razed by the last year’s battles. Kurdish teams also encountered deadly handmade explosive booby traps and mines hidden in the rubble left behind by IS.

Sinjar is an important point on IS’s supply route as it is located on a highway linking Raqqa, IS’s self-declared capital city, and Mosul, the other major IS-controlled Iraqi city captured during IS’s initial surge during the summer of 2014.

Following the liberation of Sinjar, Iraqi, American, and Kurdish forces are looking to replicate their success in Syria. U.S. troops arrived in two groups from Turkey and the territory of Iraq controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government to organize and train Kurdish and Syrian forces. Al Arabiya reported that these American soldiers are stationed in Kobane, a Syrian city near the Turkish border, in the east Syrian province of Hasakeh.

However the Sinjar community remains split along political divisions between the major Iraqi Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and their local Yazidi affiliates. Before the IS occupation, many Yazidis claimed they were underrepresented in Sinjar’s government despite the fact that they make up the majority of the local population. These political squabbles will likely undermine Sinjar’s stability in the future.