Mount Sinjar: Iraqi Kurdish forces backed by US-led strikes launched a major operation Thursday to retake the town of Sinjar from the Daesh group and cut a key supply line to Syria.
Severing the supply line would hamper the militants´ ability to move fighters and supplies between northern Iraq and Syria, two countries where Daesh has overrun significant territory.
And retaking Sinjar where Daesh carried out a brutal campaign of killings, enslavement and rape, would also be an important symbolic victory.
"The attack began at 7:00 am (0400 GMT), and the (Kurdish) peshmerga forces advanced on several axes to liberate the centre of the Sinjar district," Major General Ezzeddine Saadun told AFP.
Columns of smoke rose over the town from US-led coalition strikes and Kurdish shelling against Daesh positions in Sinjar, an AFP journalist said.
Peshmerga Major General Hashem Seetayi said that Kurdish forces had regained multiple villages north of Sinjar.
The autonomous Kurdish region´s security council said up to 7,500 of its peshmerga fighters would take part in the operation, which aims to retake Sinjar "and establish a significant buffer zone to protect the (town) and its inhabitants from incoming artillery."
"Coalition warplanes will provide close air support to peshmerga forces throughout the operation," it said.
Kurdish forces face an estimated 300 to 400 militants in the town, Captain Chance McCraw, a US military intelligence officer, told journalists in Baghdad.
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