Islamic State loses ground to Kurds backed by US airstrikes

Kurdish forces, backed by a surge of US airstrikes in recent days, recaptured a large swath of territory from Islamic State militants on Thursday, opening a path from the autonomous Kurdish region to Mount Sinjar in the west near the Syrian border.

The two-day offensive, which involved 8,000 fighters, known as peshmerga, was the largest one to date in the war against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, according to Kurdish officials.

It was also a successful demonstration of US president Barack Obama’s strategy for battling the extremist group: US airpower combined with local forces doing the fighting on the ground.

A statement released on Thursday night by the office of Masrour Barzani, the head of the Kurdistan regional security council, called the operation, “the single biggest military offensive against ISIS and the most successful.”

In August, a siege of Mount Sinjar, where thousands of people from the Yazidi religious minority were stranded and at risk of being slaughtered by the Islamic State, prompted Obama to begin the air campaign against the Islamic State. Then, the airstrikes, as well as humanitarian aid drops, helped lift the siege, and thousands of Yazidis escaped the mountain, some to Kurdish areas of Syria.

But more recently, Kurdish officials said, some of those refugees had been pushed out of Syria by the Islamic State and were again stranded in the area, though Kurdish forces and other militias have maintained control of the mountain.

The offensive was backed by 53 airstrikes from the US-led coalition, Lt Gen James Terry, the overall commander of the anti-Islamic State campaign, who is based in Kuwait, told Pentagon reporters in a teleconference on Thursday.

The strikes near Sinjar have destroyed ISIS storage units, bulldozers, guard towers, vehicles and three bridges, according to the Pentagon.

Some of the strikes were conducted by low-flying A-10 attack jets, which were recently shifted from Afghanistan and are typically used to target tanks and other armoured vehicles.

“We will relentlessly pursue Daesh in order to degrade and destroy its capabilities and defeat their efforts,” he said, referring to the Islamic State by an Arabic acronym.

In a separate statement, the Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm John Kirby, confirmed that in the last few weeks, the international airstrike campaign had also killed several senior or midlevel leaders within the Islamic State.

He would not give details about their identities or roles within the Islamic State other than to say that their deaths hurt the group’s command capabilities.

Referring to the Kurdish offensive near Sinjar, he said, “combined efforts like these are having a significant effect on Daesh’s ability to command and control, to resupply, and to conduct manoeuvring.”

The Obama administration's strategy of combining US airpower with local ground forces has worked well in northern Iraq, partnering with the Kurds.

But lately it has been less successful in other areas of the country where the embattled Iraqi army is struggling to push back against the Islamic State.

The United States has about 1,700 troops here to train Iraqi forces, and that figure is expected to rise to roughly 3,000.

While the Iraqi army, along with Shia militias, has racked up some victories - including in Jurf al-Sakr, south of Baghdad, and in eastern Diyala province - it has continued to lose territory in western Anbar province, despite recent efforts to launch a major offensive there.

North of Baghdad, the government recently took back the city of Beiji - an important town that is home to the country’s largest oil refinery - only to lose it after just a few weeks, although fighting continues and the refinery itself remains in government hands.

In the territories it occupies, the Islamic State has continued its reign of terror. The group released yet another gruesome set of pictures on Thursday, this time of a public beheading near Tikrit of a man whom the group called a sorcerer.

New York Times