Joint Effort to Break Jihadist Siege of Iraqi Turkmen Town

Iraqi government forces, Shiite militiamen and Kurdish troops launched a large operation Thursday to free Amerli, a Turkmen town that has been besieged by jihadists for 50 days, officials said.

"The Iraqi army, (Shiite) volunteers and (Kurdish) peshmerga, equipped with heavy artillery and backed by the air force, have launched an operation to break the siege of Amerli and clear the neighboring town of Sulaiman Bek," the mayor of neighboring Tuz Khurmatu, Shallal Abdul Baban, told AFP.

He said four Shiite militiamen and two Iraqi soldiers had already been killed in the offensive, which began before dawn.

Abdul Baban also said 39 other Iraqi troops and volunteers, as well as four peshmerga, were wounded.

A regional security official and a peshmerga source confirmed the information.

The anti-jihadist forces were said to be only three kilometers (two miles) from Amerli, a town of 20,000 mainly Shiite Turkmen that has been completely surrounded by Islamic State militants since June 18.

For weeks, residents had appealed for a military intervention and warned that food, medication and water were in short supply.

It was not immediately clear how close the pro-government forces were to breaking the siege imposed by jihadists who had been controlling all 34 villages around Amerli.

For weeks, government forces had remained south of Amerli, apparently unable to push any further, and peshmerga forces had maintained positions in Tuz Khurmatu, apparently unwilling to move.

The string of setbacks suffered by the peshmerga in recent days and the federal forces' inability to regain the ground it lost when IS launched its major offensive two months ago have led to mounting domestic and international pressure for Baghdad and the Kurds to set aside their differences and cooperate on the ground.

Iraq's Turkmen minority, of Turkic ethnicity, is one of the country's largest and lives exclusively in the north. It is mostly Sunni Muslim but its Shiite component has been systematically targeted by jihadists over the past two months.

Earlier, peshmerga forces protecting the Mosul dam, said to be Iraq's largest, repelled a jihadist attack on Thursday, a spokesman said.

"Daash (Islamic State) launched an attack on Mosul dam but the peshmerga repelled it," Halgurd Hekmat said. 

"They left at least one body and four destroyed humvees behind in their retreat," he said.

Islamic State militants, who seized Iraq's second city of Mosul on June 10, conquered several areas east and north late last week and have been threatening the dam for days.

The peshmerga have their elite Zerevani fighters at the Mosul dam, a vital piece of infrastructure that would give the jihadists control over water and electricity for the entire region. 

Later on Thursday, a car bomb blast ripped through a Shiite mosque Thursday in the Kurdish-controlled Iraqi city of Kirkuk where people displaced by attacks on nearby towns had found refuge, police and medics said.

Among the victims of the blast, which killed at least six people and wounded 37, were women and children who had been forced from their homes in Amerli, Bashir and Taza, Dr Mohammed Abdallah from Kirkuk hospital said.