Kurdish forces backed by foreign jets pressed an ambitious operation against the Islamic State group in northern Iraq today, taking on the jihadists in the heart of their "caliphate".
After mass bombing by aircraft of the US-led coalition paved the way for ground troops yesterday, Iraq's Kurdish peshmerga retook several villages and closed in on the Sinjar area.
The anti-IS war's top commander, US Lieutenant General James Terry, said today that 50 air strikes had allowed the Kurds to "regain approximately 100 square kilometres of ground".
IS captured Sinjar in early August, and preventing a genocide against its largely Yazidi minority was a reason US President Barack Obama put forward for launching the air war against the jihadists.
Fresh strikes were conducted today north of Tall Afar, one of the first areas to fall to IS fighters in early June, said Anwar Brahim, a senior officer with the Kurds' intelligence services.
"At around 7:00 am (0400 GMT), there were coalition strikes on Nahyat al-Ayadhiya," Brahim told AFP. "A large deployment of peshmerga is ready to close in on Sinjar."
An AFP reporter saw the mangled bodies of IS fighters killed by the air strikes and which peshmerga fighters covered with sand to reduce the stench.
Kurdish forces used heavy artillery to pound IS positions in the area but officials said the fighting was less intense than yesterday.
In Hanakeh, one of the villages the peshmerga took back, one bridge had been blown up and another still had four barrels filled with TNT on it, suggesting the jihadists had to flee before they had time to destroy it.
The US military command supervising the coalition air campaign said yesterday that 61 air strikes had been carried out in Iraq since Monday.
That was some of the heaviest bombardment since the jihadist onslaught on the Sinjar area and towards Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region prompted the first US air raids four months ago.
