Kurdish Forces Break IS Mountain Siege

Kurdish forces in Iraq claim to have broken an Islamic State siege that left Yazidi civilians and fighters trapped on a mountain for almost four months.

The breakthrough came during a two-day blitz in the Sinjar region involving 8,000 peshmerga fighters and some of the heaviest airstrikes since a US-led coalition started an air campaign in September.

Speaking at an operations centre near the border with Syria, Masrour Barzani, the son of the Kurdish president and the intelligence chief for the Iraqi autonomous region, said: "Peshmerga forces have reached Mount Sinjar, the siege on the mountain has been lifted."

The peshmerga said they had recaptured eight villages and killed around 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.

They suffered seven losses on Wednesday when they failed to stop an IS suicide bomber who rammed an explosives-packed armoured vehicle into their convoy, officers at the scene told AFP.

Mr Barzani added in a statement: "This operation represents the single biggest military offensive against IS and the most successful."

The peshmerga commander for the area said troops had reached the mountain and secured a road that would enable people to leave, effectively breaking the siege.

Several thousand are still thought to be trapped there.

"Tomorrow most of the people will come down from the mountain," Mohamed Kojar told AFP by phone, explaining the offensive had secured a corridor northeast of the mountain.

A Yazidi leader at the top of the mountain, however, said he could see no sign of a military deployment.

A peshmerga commander explained that any evacuation would only begin on Friday.

Kurdish officials said the operation had dealt the jihadists a blow by cutting their supply lines and forcing them to retreat to urban bastions such as Tal Afar and Mosul, their main hub.

Jihadists still control the town of Sinjar, on the southern side of the mountain, and many of the surrounding villages.

The siege began after a devastating IS attack on the Yazidi heartland in August displaced tens of thousands of people, leaving them trapped in the summer heat with no supplies.

Their desperate situation was one of the main reasons behind Barack Obama's decision to launch airstrikes in September.

In Washington, meanwhile, the Pentagon announced that three top IS leaders in Iraq had been killed in US air strikes in recent weeks.