Kurdish forces retake parts of Mosul Dam

Kurdish forces took over parts of Iraq’s largest dam yesterday less than two weeks after it was captured by the Islamic State extremist group, as US and Iraqi planes aided their advance by bombing militant targets near the facility.

The US began targeting Islamic State fighters with airstrikes a little over a week ago, allowing Kurdish forces to fend off an advance on their regional capital Irbil and to help tens of thousands of members of religious minorities to escape the onslaught.

Recapturing the dam would be a significant victory against the Islamic State group, which has seized vast swathes of northern and western Iraq and northeastern Syria. The dam supplies electricity and water for irrigation to a large part of the country.

The Kurdish peshmerga forces launched the operation early yesterday to retake the Mosul Dam, General Tawfik Desty, a Kurdish commander, told reporters. He said his forces now control the eastern part of the dam and that fighting is still under way.

Another commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Kurdish forces were hindered by roadside bombs planted by retreating Islamic State fighters.

He added that peshmerga forces had taken the nearby town of Tel Kasouf by yesterday morning.

“They are advancing slowly. The obstacles are the roadside bombs. It’s a Daash tactic,” he said, referring to the Islamic State by an Arabic acronym.

“They have reached inside the dam. There is no fighting, just the (roadside) bombs, and the abandoned buildings are all rigged with explosives.”

He said the peshmerga are now waiting for 15 Iraqi military Humvees with mechanised bomb-disposal units and that some of the explosives had been placed in abandoned buildings by Iraqi troops in an earlier bid to stall the militants’ advance. Years of troubled relations between the Kurds and central government in Baghdad has hindered the supply of arms to the force leaving them overstretched and outgunned in the face of the initial advance by the Islamic State.

On Saturday, the US Central Command said nine airstrikes had been launched near the dam, destroying four armoured personnel carriers, seven armed vehicles, two Humvees and another armoured vehicle.

Meanwhile, Islamic extremists shot dead scores of Yazidi men in Iraq, lining them up in small groups and opening fire with assault rifles before seizing their wives and children.

A Yazidi politician cited the mass killing in Kocho as evidence that his people were still at risk after a week of US and Iraqi airstrikes on the militants.