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Kurdish Forces Retake Strategic Highway in Iraq’s North From ISIS Kurdish Forces Retake Strategic Highway in Iraq’s North From ISIS
(about 7 hours later)
MOUNT SINJAR, Iraq — 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. MOUNT SINJAR, Iraq — Sweeping down in hodgepodge convoys of trucks and buses, Kurdish forces and Yazidi fighters opened their offensive against Islamic State militants in northern Iraq on Thursday with a burst of initial success: The forces cut off the main highway the jihadists used as a supply line, and they moved in to begin fighting for the town of Sinjar.
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. The fall of that town to the Islamic State last year was the start of a wave of atrocities — the killing, enslavement and rape of thousands of people from the Yazidi religious minority — that led the Obama administration to step up its use of air power against the jihadists. And it was with heavy American airstrikes that the fight to retake Sinjar began in the early morning hours of Thursday.
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. More than 7,000 fighters — mostly Kurdish forces, but also Yazidi fighters seeking revenge against the jihadists — raced toward an important supply road, Highway 47, coming from different directions to try to cut off as many as 700 Islamic State militants believed to be waiting in and around Sinjar, flanked by thick fields of improvised bombs.
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. Trying to achieve some element of surprise, the Kurdish commander of one of the assault’s main forks, Maj. Gen. Aziz Waisi, had directed some of his fighters to head to the south on a rugged and serpentine route over Mount Sinjar, following a dry river bed. After a breakfast of watery soup, under clear morning skies as American airstrikes softened the defenses ahead, his men set out.
“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. The advance was stop and start, at times violently rugged, careening over steep pitches. Other times, the convoy halted completely, a long line of vehicles waiting as earthmoving equipment was brought in to reshape the rocky terrain ahead.
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. Later, one fighter who was keeping watch for Islamic State suicide attackers along the highway said his nervousness about a potential jihadist counterassault was nothing compared with the nightmare of the twisting drive down Mount Sinjar.
“Up until now we have taken back 35 kilometers of the highway,” said Qassim Simo, the head of a pesh merga intelligence unit on Mount Sinjar. “This was all done by pesh merga and Yazidi forces.” “We were ordered to take the road,” said the pesh merga fighter, Hamid Khudir Ahmed, 24. “Otherwise, I would never have taken it.”
P.K.K. leaders, however, countered that they had taken and now controlled the road west of Sinjar, which is still held by the Islamic State, while the pesh merga controlled the eastern part. The vehicles made a motley fleet: sport utility vehicles, jeeps, buses, motorcycles and light trucks with jury-rigged heavy machine gun mounts in the back. The Kurdish flag was prominently displayed.
United States-led coalition air forces pounded the area overnight in preparation for the offensive. As the campaign got underway, long columns of pesh merga vehicles, including pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles and a small number of armored vehicles, snaked their way across Mount Sinjar as airstrikes boomed in the distance. The pesh merga fighters themselves were lightly equipped, most with AK-47s and small arms, and many without any body armor. And they were all fighting, in effect, without pay; the Kurdish government was so low on cash that it was three months behind in paying pesh merga salaries.
Some of the fighters walked alongside the vehicles, headed for the front in Sinjar. Along the way, a suicide car bomb was blown up by a pesh merga antitank missile before the driver could reach his target. The Kurds had managed to acquire a small number of armored American Humvees, picked up after the Iraqi Army abandoned them as soldiers fled last year’s rapid offensive by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. But the pesh merga were having less luck with another piece of captured American equipment: a heavily armored personnel carrier. It broke down and had to be towed as the other vehicles carried on.
The battle plan called for the pesh merga, joined by Yazidi forces, to sweep down from Mount Sinjar to attack fighters of the Islamic State on multiple fronts. Kurdish officials said there could be as many as 700 Islamic State fighters in and around Sinjar, including foreign jihadists. Simply reaching the base of the mountain turned into a cause for celebration. Blasting Kurdish music, some pesh merga fighters got out of their vehicles and danced. But after a hasty meal of bread and canned fish, they were on the march again.
The operation, which comes as the American-led coalition is trying to regain the initiative in the struggle with the Islamic State, holds out the possibility of progress along a new front in northern Iraq. The Obama administration has been under pressure to show that it has a workable strategy for defeating the Islamic State, and it is looking to the successful prosecution of this offensive as a first step. As they approached Highway 47, the scream of military jets — A-10 attack planes and B-1 heavy bombers, according to the American command — and the thud of explosions grew closer.
The aim is to add pressure on Islamic State fighters who are being pressed militarily in northeast Syria and Iraq. They are currently partly encircled in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province in Iraq, and were recently evicted from Baiji in northern Iraq, the site of a strategic oil refinery. American forces were involved on the ground as well. Roughly two dozen United States Special Forces members were serving as advisers to pesh merga forces away from the immediate fighting, American officials said. Half of them were with the main headquarters at the foot of Mount Sinjar, and the other dozen were spread along the long mountain ridge to advise Kurdish airstrike spotters as they chose targets, according to one senior American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the operations.
Still, the operation faces several important military and political challenges. General Waisi’s Kurdish force, known as the Zeravani Force, spread out to secure a broader swath of the highway west of Sinjar. But other forces working in parallel were at work on different stretches. By midday, Kurdish officials said they controlled about 22 miles of Highway 47, stretching both east and west of Sinjar, effectively cutting off one of the main supply routes for the Islamic State between Syria and the vital jihadist-held city of Mosul in Iraq.
Even if the Sinjar campaign succeeds, the Islamic State has a stranglehold on vital areas in the region, including Mosul and large portions of eastern Syria and western Iraq. That includes most of the Sunni Arab heartland of Anbar Province, where a government-led military push has advanced toward Ramadi but has not yet managed to retake it from the militants. Beyond the tactical division of the forces, there were political forces at work. After months of tension among rival Kurdish factions, which some analysts said played a part in delaying the start of the offensive, the main body of pesh merga forces out of Iraqi Kurdistan was taking the lead on Thursday. It included a unit of Yazidi fighters, as well as some volunteers, including some fighters from Syria.
The United States-led coalition has also had continuing troubles handling stark divisions between the factions nominally aligned under the anti-Islamic State banner, infighting over who should control the area once it is liberated that threatened to upend the attack even in its late stages. But fighters from the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the P.K.K., listed as a terrorist group by the United States and some of its allies, were also fighting ISIS on a different stretch of road. Even though most of the Yazidi fighters were accompanying the government forces, they tend to favor the P.K.K. over the Kurdish government, crediting the group for helping many escape ISIS last year as the jihadists swept over Mount Sinjar.
Before the Islamic State swept across northern Iraq, the area was a political stronghold for the Kurdistan Democratic Party of President Massoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq, who is overseeing the Sinjar operation from a command post in northwest Iraq. Capt. Chia Zaki, a pesh merga officer in charge of an artillery position behind a hill on the western flank of Sinjar, said he and his men saw at least 20 vehicles ferrying P.K.K. fighters to the front line over the course of the day.
But many Yazidis — a tiny religious minority that was almost entirely based around Mount Sinjar before the Islamic State’s advance — blame the pesh merga and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, commonly known as the K.D.P., for failing to prevent Sinjar’s fall in the first place and subjecting them to a catalog of horrors by the Islamic State, including the sexual enslavement of thousands of women. Captain Zaki said his pesh merga superiors were at first vexed by the P.K.K.’s insistence on pushing toward Sinjar and had tried to get the militia to agree to a more limited role on the battlefield.
That calamity led to the flight of hundreds of thousands of Yazidis, tens of thousands of whom spent a week or more exposed to a blazing August sun on the barren slopes of Mount Sinjar with little food or water. They were eventually rescued by the Syrian Kurdish militia of the P.K.K., which is considered a terrorist organization by the Turkish government. Instead, from his vantage, he said he could see that the P.K.K. remained in the vanguard in some areas, stretching up into the outskirts of Sinjar by nightfall. But he said he was willing to accept that as long as ISIS was beaten as a result. “When we face the same enemy,” Captain Zaki said, “we need to put our political differences to the side.”
As a result, the Yazidis’ sympathies now lie strongly with the P.K.K., creating tensions over who will control the territory in the event that it is liberated from the Islamic State. As the various forces started moving toward Sinjar, they faced more hazardous ground, laced with improvised bombs.
“Yazidi support has shifted away from the K.D.P.,” said Christine van den Toorn, who directs the Institute for Regional and International Studies at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimaniya. “If Sinjar is to be retaken from ISIS, repopulated and rebuilt, the K.D.P. cannot be the only liberator and ruler.” At one point, General Waisi’s pesh merga force detected explosives. “TNT!” one fighter called out, using the force’s catchall nickname for the bombs. But without any sophisticated mine-clearing equipment, the force had to redirect its vehicles across a rocky hillside. It was easier to forge a new route then clear the planned one.
Some analysts say the standoff between the P.K.K. and the pesh merga, dragging on for months, was a significant factor in the drawn-out planning for the offensive. In the afternoon, one of the other threats posed by the Islamic State became clear. A huge fireball erupted when a suicide car bomb exploded on the eastern outskirts of Sinjar, enveloping the pesh merga’s vehicles in a thick dark cloud.
“The real story here is that this offensive has been delayed because of the unresolved competition between the pesh merga and the P.K.K. for control of the Sinjar area,” said Matthew Barber, an expert on the region and a board member of Yazda, an organization helping displaced Yazidis. “Even now the real question is, Who will have control of the area after the new offensive ends?” One pesh merga fighter said Kurdish fighters had blown up the vehicle with a German Milan antitank missile, though the details of that engagement could not be independently confirmed. Black plumes of smoke rose from the outskirts of Sinjar.
While a Yazidi regiment is to participate in part of the pesh merga offensive, other Yazidi fighters have been operating independently, and all are eager to exact revenge on the Islamic State fighters for their actions 15 months ago, when they overran Mount Sinjar. General Waisi’s men began fortifying the stretch of highway they had claimed, piling up dirt mounds and berms. One team set a 106-millimeter recoilless rifle on top of a mound, leveled to fire on any vehicle bearing down on them from the direction of the Islamic State’s fighters.
Tactically, preparations for the Sinjar offensive have been underway for weeks, and the Islamic State appears to have anticipated the assault and has been sending reinforcements, General Waisi said. Progress halted as night fell and a deep chill set in. The pesh merga began making small fires and settling in.
With more than a year to dig in, the militants are also believed to have fortified their positions and made plans for a counterstrike. American and Kurdish officials described the Sinjar offensive as an important step to put pressure on the Islamic State and make it harder for the group to move supplies.
Throughout the conflict, the Islamic State has used improvised explosive devices to create dense minefields. The aim is to slow down attacking forces and channel them into “kill zones” so they can be targeted with sniper fire, mortars or machine-gun fire. Many of the houses in Sinjar are believed to be rigged with explosives. But it is just one front in a far-flung and protracted war against the Islamic State, which holds crucial areas across western Iraq and eastern Syria. Even as Kurdish and Yazidi forces were savoring an initial day of success, questions emerged about whether the Islamic State would keep up any heavy fighting to retain Sinjar now that it was mostly cut off.
Using suicide car bombs, the militants are also said to be poised to mount counterattacks from Tal Afar to the east, from the towns of Blij and Baaj to the south, and from Syria to the west. Up on the hills above the western edges of Sinjar, the commander of the pesh merga’s First Special Forces Brigade, Rawan Barzani, looked down on the city through binoculars. As clouds from American airstrikes rose over the city, he and an aide said they could see small groups of Islamic State fighters leaving on foot.
“They try to identify a weak point in the defense and then send everything possible to that single point,” General Waisi said. “It starts with suicide bombers and then heavy machine guns. We know their tactics, but there will be surprises.” “They couldn’t escape by vehicle. They escaped separately so that the airstrikes wouldn’t hit them,” said the aide, Hoshyar Disko. “Some dropped their weapons and put on clothes like civilians.”
The operation on Thursday was timed to coincide with forecasts of several days of clear weather. That would enable the United States to provide more air power, including A-10 Warthog attack jets based in Turkey.
Still, coping with the Islamic State’s improvised explosive devices will not be easy for the pesh merga, who suffered losses of more than two dozen, virtually all from such explosives, in a recent operation near Kirkuk, according to allied officials.
The pesh merga have received 40 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs, from the United States, 15 of which have special rollers attached to clear mines. But Kurdish officials say the vehicles are not nearly enough, given the 600-mile front the Kurds share with the Islamic State. Nor have armored Humvees or armored bulldozers been provided by the Americans.
The pesh merga have received hundreds of Milan antitank missiles from Germany and 1,000 AT4 antitank weapons from the United States, officials say. Kurds say the Milan missiles have proved to be the most useful in defending against suicide vehicle attacks, but pesh merga commanders say they need more of them.
The American-led coalition has also provided the pesh merga with a large number of small arms, including machine guns, rifles, mortar tubes and mortar rounds. As the Sinjar offensive has approached, Kurdish officials say, the coalition has been rushing in new supplies of ammunition as well.
Even if Sinjar is retaken and the highway is held, more military steps will need to be taken if the American-led coalition wants to cut off supplies from Syria to Mosul, said Michael Knights, a military expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“It will slow down the flow of Islamic State traffic to and from Mosul,” Mr. Knights said. “That traffic will be forced to move on desert tracks and local roads to the south of Sinjar, which will greatly reduce the flow.”