SINJAR (Iraq): Backed by air strikes by a US-led coalition, Kurdish fighters pushed into the contested northern Iraqi town of Sinjar on Sunday, touching off heavy clashes with Islamic State (IS) militants who have controlled the area for months.

The battle for Sinjar and the surrounding areas has become the latest focus in the campaign to take back territory lost to IS during the militants’ summer blitz that captured much of northern and western Iraq. IS also controls a large chunk of neighbouring Syria.

Last week, Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters launched the operation to retake Sinjar, and opened up a passageway to Mount Sinjar, which overlooks the town. That push allowed some of the thousands of Yazidis trapped on the mountain following the town’s fall in August to evacuate.

Autonomous region’s president visits Mount Sinjar and vows to defeat militant group

On Sunday, sounds of loud explosions and intense gun battles were heard from inside the town as coalition aircraft bombed IS militants.

The president of the self-ruled northern Kurdish region, Masoud Barzani, toured Kurdish positions on Mount Sinjar, where he vowed to defeat the IS group.

“Most of the districts are under our control,” Mr Barzani told peshmerga troops. “We will crush the Islamic State.” At least 15 Kurdish fighters wounded in Sunday’s clashes were brought from the front-lines to a makeshift clinic on the mountain.

The spokesman for the Kurdish forces, Jabbar Yawar, said the fighters were still facing resistance from pockets of IS militants still inside the town and that it was “far from cleared”. He declined to provide more details on the ongoing operation.

Meanwhile, Iraqi counter-terrorism forces launched an offensive on Saturday to retake the military airport near the town of Tal Afar from the IS group, said a Baghdad official.

Tal Afar is a mixed Shia-Sunni city of some 200,000 located strategically near the Syrian border to the east of Sinjar.

In Syria the US-led coalition carried out at least a dozen air strikes against IS-controlled towns in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The group monitors the conflict through a network of activists on the ground. The Local Coordination Committees also reported the strikes near the town of Dabiq. There was no word on casualties.

Mainstream rebels as well as Al Qaeda-linked fighters have been battling IS northeast of the city of Aleppo for months, while also trying to fend off an advance by Syrian government forces to encircle the opposition-held areas of the city.

Published in Dawn, December 22th, 2014