Capt. Ramazan Sanaan, commander of a base atop a mountain overlooking the town, said he and his men were waiting for units to cut off the main supply road in and out of Sinjar before they moved in.
“Actually it’s going very slow,” he said, with progress hampered by explosives and roadside bombs, a favored weapon of the IS group in Iraq.
Warplanes in the U.S.-led coalition have been striking around Sinjar ahead of the offensive and strikes grew more intense at dawn Thursday. But Sinjar, located at the foot of Sinjar Mountain about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the Syrian border, is not an easy target. One attempt by the Kurds to retake it stalled in December. The militants have been reinforcing their ranks in Sinjar recently in expectation of an assault, though the U.S.-led coalition was not able to give specifics on the size of the IS forces.
“On the radio we hear (ISIS) calling for reinforcements from Syria,” Rebwar Gharib, a deputy sergeant on the central front line said Thursday.
The ISIS group inflicted a wave of terror in the Sinjar area against the minority Yazidi community, members of an ancient religion whom the ISIS group views as heretics and accuses of worshipping the devil. An untold number were killed in the August 2014 assault, and hundreds of men and women were kidnapped — the women enslaved and given to militants across the group’s territory in Iraq and Syria, many of the men believed killed, others forced to convert.
Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled into the mountains, where the militants surrounded them, leaving them trapped and exposed in the blazing heat. The crisis prompted the U.S. to launch air drops of aid to the stranded, and then on August 8, it launched the first round of airstrikes in what would mark the beginning of a broader coalition effort to battle the militant group in Iraq and Syria.
Some of those stranded on Mount Sinjar were rescued by Syrian Kurdish fighters, who cleared a path for the Yazidis to descend from the mountain, cross into Syria, then cross back into northern Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous zone. Then, in December, Kurdish fighters in northwestern Iraq managed to drive the militants out of areas on the other side of the mountain, opening a corridor that helped many of the remaining Sinjaris to escape. Those Kurdish fighters then tried to advance into Sinjar town itself but were fought off by the militants.
Various Kurdish militias on the town’s edge have been fighting guerrilla battles for months with IS, damaging or destroying much of the picturesque town of ancient, narrow streets lined with modest stone homes. The factions include the Turkey-based Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), the Syria-based People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Yazidi-led forces billing themselves as the Sinjar Resistance. Iraqi Kurdish fighters have also held positions further outside the town.
