Thousands of fighters led by the Kurds have secured a strategic highway in northern Iraq and are poised to take the city of Sinjar back from the Islamic State in an effort to free thousands of enslaved Yazidis.
Thousands of Kurdish and Yazidi forces captured a key highway in northern Iraq on Thursday that will set the stage for them to attack the key city of Sinjar. The city is currently a stronghold of the Islamic State who took Sinjar last year. Since then, the Islamic State has tortured, killed, and enslaved thousands of Yazidis.
The Kurds moved with 7,500 soldiers in a three-pronged movement to take the highway and to isolate Sinjar in preparation for their attack on the city, reports The New York Times. By cutting off the highway, the Kurds and the Yazidis have severed an important Islamic State supply route into the city and the surrounding region. In taking the highway and cutting off supply lines, the Kurds have also retaken the village of Gabara which lies just a little to the west of Sinjar.
Capturing this highway has effectively cut off the major road between Iraq and Syria. It will now be more difficult for the Islamic State to move soldiers and supplies. Kurdish soldiers moved in tandem to join up with the Yazidi fighters coming around Mount Sinjar. Sinjar lies right on the northern border of Iraq with Syria.
The American led coalition against the Islamic State is seeing this capturing of the highway as another small step in trying to isolate and destroy the Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq. The Islamic State is already surrounded at the Iraqi city of Ramadi and were recently defeated at the city of Baiji which had been critical to the Islamic State’s oil supplies as well as being a source of revenue for them.
Despite these efforts, the Islamic State still has a stranglehold on the regions of northern Iraq, including the city of Mosul, as well as being firmly entrenched in much of western Iraq and eastern Syria. The U.S. continues to struggle with the coalition forces who, though united against a common enemy, continue to battle one another for captured territory. Even though the Kurds and the Yazidis united together to take the highway and move on to Sinjar, the two peoples have a history of animosity toward one another.
