Kurdish Forces Retake Strategic Highway in Iraq’s North From ISIS

Kurdish forces aided by thousands of lightly armed Yazidi fighters captured a strategic highway on Thursday in northern Iraq in the early stages of an offensive to reclaim the town of Sinjar from the Islamic State, which seized it last year and murdered, raped and enslaved thousands of Yazidis.

As many as 7,500 Kurdish pesh merga fighters were moving on “three fronts to cordon off Sinjar City, take control of ISIL’s strategic supply routes, and establish a significant buffer zone to protect the city and its inhabitants from incoming artillery,” the security council of the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq said in a statement, using an acronym for the Islamic State.

Describing the unfolding battle, Kurdish officials said that pesh merga forces had taken the village of Gabara, west of Sinjar, and had cut the supply line, Highway 47, the major east-west road that connects Syria to Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and that serves as a lifeline for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

But continuing the factional tensions that plagued the planning of the operation and had created delays, troops with the government pesh merga units and fighters from the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., fought in separate theaters and made competing claims — all with an eye to establishing control of the area if it is liberated.

“We cut the road between Syria and Iraq three hours ago, at around eight in the morning,” said Moslum Shingal, the nom de guerre of a P.K.K. commander on the mountain who was reached by telephone. Gaining control of the road could hamper the Islamic State’s movement of fighters, fuel and supplies within its self-declared caliphate and force the militants to resort to less efficient smuggling routes.

By midday, the combined forces said they had captured a 35-kilometer, or about 22-mile, stretch of the highway on either side of Sinjar, accomplishing one of the principal aims of the operation. However, there were competing claims from the two sides about which group had taken the road first and who held the checkpoints along the controlled portion of the road.

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