Islamic State group militants retreating from the town of Sinjar, where a months-old siege was recently broken by Kurdish peshmerga forces, left behind graffiti calling Kurds Israeli dogs. Kurds and Israel have a long history of semi-secret ties. Israel forces reportedly trained Kurdish commandos and some Kurds see Israel as a role model for an independent Kurdistan, Times of Israel reported – in part, due to their Western ties. According to Times of Israel, IS militants wrote the flag of Israeli dogs on a Kurdish flag. A photograph of it was posted on a Kurdish news site. Kurdish forces pushed deep into jihadist strongholds in northern Iraq Thursday, breaking a siege on a mountain where Yazidi civilians and fighters have been trapped for months. The two-day blitz into the Sinjar region involved 8,000 peshmerga fighters and some of the heaviest air strikes since a US-led coalition started an air campaign four months ago. Masrour Barzani, who is the son of the Kurdish president and the intelligence chief for the autonomous region, said the peshmerga advance had broken the siege on Mount Sinjar. Peshmerga forces have reached Mount Sinjar, the siege on the mountain has been lifted, he told reporters from an operations centre near the border with Syria. The peshmerga said they recaptured eight villages on the way and killed about 80 IS fighters in the initial phase of the offensive launched from Rabia on the Syria border and Zumar on the shores of Mosul dam lake. It was the seizure of Sinjar by IS jihadists in early August and the plight of the mostly Yazidi minority population there that President Barack Obama cited when he first announced US military intervention in Iraq four months ago.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 09:56:37 +0000
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