ARBIL: Kurdish forces in northern Iraq are drawing up plans to break Islamic State’s siege of Sinjar mountain, where hundreds of minority Yazidis remain stranded months after fleeing their homes.
Seeking to regain territory and repair pride in his military forces, Masoud Barzani, president of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, is overseeing efforts to retake the mountain, senior party members said.
Islamic State attacked the Sinjar area in August, sending thousands of Yazidis fleeing up the mountain, a craggy strip some 65km long.
Hundreds of Yazidis were executed, Iraqi officials and witnesses said, by Islamic State militants who see the adherents of an ancient faith derived from Zoroastrianism as devil-worshippers. A senior UN rights official said the onslaught looked like “attempted genocide”.
Kurdish peshmerga forces have regained between 65 and 75 percent of the ground lost to Islamic State in the area since the US began a campaign of air strikes in August, said Halgurd Hikmat, spokesman for the Kurdish Peshmerga Ministry.
But Sinjar’s awkward geography — out on a limb to the west, has made it difficult to penetrate.
“Our priority now is Sinjar,” said Hikmat. “A plan will be in place within the coming days.”
The strategy was to cut off an Islamic State supply route between Mosul and Syria which runs along the southern foot of the mountain, Hikmat said. He did not elaborate.
Controlling Sinjar would put the peshmerga on three sides of Mosul, the largest city under Islamic State control in northern Iraq, and allow them to gain positions for any future offensive to retake the city and nearby areas which have been the target of Iraqi and US air strikes. “After that, we must coordinate with Baghdad and the coalition (of Western and Gulf Arab states) to get Islamic State out of Mosul,” said Hikmat.
Mosul has become the focus of the government’s military efforts because of both its size and its symbolic status after Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi delivered a public speech at the Grand Mosque there in July, Baghdadi, who sees himself as ‘caliph’ of an Islamic state he has declared in parts of Iraq and Syria, told his fighters they were victorious after years of patience and holy struggle.
Estimates of the number of people still stranded on Sinjar mountain — part of disputed land claimed by both the Kurds and Baghdad — vary from 10,000 to fewer than 1,000.
Reuters
