Kurdish forces launch major offensive to free Sinjar from IS

Iraqi Kurdish forces on Thursday launched major offensive to free the town of Sinjar from Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq's northern province of Nineveh, a Kurdish security source said.

The attack began in the morning when thousands of Kurdish security members, known as Peshmerga, advanced from several axes toward the town which located about 100 km west of the provincial capital city of Mosul, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The troops backed by international air craft managed to destroy the outer defensive lines of IS militants around the town, while the Kurdish artillery and mortar rounds were heavily pounding the IS positions in Sinjar, the source said.

The offensive to free Sinjar was carried out under the supervision of Masoud Barzani, the president of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan, the source said, adding that some 6,000 paramilitary Yazidis are taking part in the offensive to free their town from the extremist militants.

The Yazidi minority are primarily ethnic Kurds whose religion incorporates elements of many faiths. There are about 600,000 Yazidis live in Iraq with around 80 percent of them living in the towns of Sinjar and Ba'shika in the Nineveh province.

Nineveh's towns of Sinjar, Zumar and Sunoni are parts of the disputed areas of mixed ethnicities of Kurds, Arabs, Turkmans and others.

The Kurds demanded the expansion of their sovereign region in northern Iraq to include the oil-rich province of Kirkuk and other areas in the Iraqi provinces of Nineveh, Salahudin and Diyala, but their request was fiercely opposed by the Iraqi government. Endit