Kurdish forces attacked Islamic State fighters near the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil in northern Iraq yesterday in a change of tactics supported by the Iraqi central government to try to break the Islamists’ momentum.
The attack 40 kilometres southwest of Arbil came after the Sunni militants inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Kurds on Sunday with a rapid advance through three towns, prompting Iraq’s prime minister to order his air force for the first time to back the Kurdish forces.
“We have changed our tactics from being defensive to being offensive. Now we are clashing with the Islamic State in Makhmur,” said Jabbar Yawar, secretary-general of the ministry in charge of the Kurdish peshmerga fighters.
The location of the clashes puts the Islamic State fighters closer than they have ever been to the Kurdish semi-autonomous region since they swept through northern Iraq almost unopposed in June.
Shortly after that lightning advance, thousands of US-trained Iraqi soldiers fled. Kurdish fighters, who often boast of their battles with Saddam Hussein’s forces, stepped in as did Iranian-trained Shi’ite militias.
Meanwhile 50 people were killed in fighting between Iraqi government forces and Islamic State insurgents in the northern city of Mosul yesterday, hospital officials said.
We have changed our tactics from being defensive to being offensive
Witnesses said the dead had been held in a makeshift prison created by the Sunni Islamist militants that was bombed by government aircraft. That could not be immediately confirmed. Government officials were not immediately available for comment.
Mosul has been under insurgent control since June, but there have been hit and run attacks by government forces and allied Kurdish peshmerga fighters.
In the capital Baghdad yesterday, car bombs exploded in crowded markets in Shi’ite Muslim districts, killing at least 10 people, police said.
Yawar said the Kurds had re-established military cooperation with Baghdad. Ties had been strained with the Shi’ite-led Baghdad government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki over oil, budgets and land.
But the dramatic weekend offensive by the Sunni militants – who seized more towns, a fifth oilfield and reached Iraq’s biggest dam – prompted them to bury their differences.
“The Peshmerga Ministry sent a message to the Iraqi Defence Ministry requesting the convening of an urgent meeting on military cooperation. The joint committees have been reactivated,” Yawar said by telephone.
The Islamic State, which has declared a ‘caliphate’ in swathes of Iraq and Syria that it controls and threatens to march on Baghdad, poses the biggest threat to Opec member Iraq since a US-led invasion toppled Saddam in 2003.
Efforts to neutralise the Islamic State have been undermined by political deadlock and sectarian tensions fuelling levels of violence not seen since the height of a civil war in 2006-2007.
Bombings, kidnappings and executions have become part of daily life for many Iraqis once again. Yesterday, a roadside bomb killed three Shi’ites who volunteered to fight the Islamic State on a road between the town of Samarra and Mosul, said a police official.
The Islamic State, which believes Iraq’s majority Shi’ites are infidels who deserve to be killed, has put Iraq’s survival as a unified state in jeopardy. It seized three more towns and a fifth oilfield and reached Iraq’s biggest dam during the weekend offensive.
The capture of one of the towns, Sinjar, home to many of Iraq’s Yazidi minority sect, could lead to a humanitarian crisis.
Yazidis, ethnic Kurds who follow an ancient religion derived from Zoroastrianism, are at high risk of being executed because the Islamic State militants view them as devil worshippers.
Yawar said 50,000 Yazidis now hiding on a mountain risked starving to death if they were not rescued within 24 hours.