Iraq presses fightback after breaking jihadist siege

Iraqi troops, Kurdish fighters and Shiite militiamen backed by US air strikes pressed a fightback against jihadist-led militants Monday, buoyed by breaking the 11-week siege of a Shiite town.
The breakthrough to the town of Amerli is the biggest offensive success for the Iraqi government since militants led by the jihadist Islamic State (IS) group overran much of the Sunni Arab heartland north and west of Baghdad in June.
It came as the United States carried out limited air strikes in the area, the first time it has expanded its more than three-week air campaign against IS beyond the north, while the United Nations announced that violence in Iraq killed more than 1,400 people in August.
Iraqi forces kept up the momentum of their advance on Monday, with Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen retaking Sulaiman Bek, a town north of Amerli that had been an important militant stronghold.
"Within a few hours, we were able to clear the town completely," the commander of the Shiite Badr militia, Transport Minister Hadi al-Ameri, told AFP amid heavy security in Sulaiman Bek.
Fighters celebrated in the abandoned town, firing in the air, chanting slogans against IS, and parading a captured black jihadist flag, an AFP journalist reported.
Troops backed by Kurdish fighters and Shiite militiamen also surrounded the nearby town of Yankaja and were pounding it with artillery and machinegun fire as they fought to retake it from militants.
Before the operation, the mainly Shiite Turkmen residents of Amerli, to the south, were endangered both because of their faith, which jihadists consider heresy, and their resistance to the militants, which has drawn harsh retribution elsewhere.
UN Iraq envoy Nickolay Mladenov had warned that they faced a "massacre" by the besieging militants.
The operation to free Amerli was launched on Saturday after days of preparationss.
The government's reliance on Shiite militiamen in this and other operations poses serious dangers for Iraq, risking entrenching groups with a history of brutal sectarian killings.
- US expands air campaign -
The United States said it had carried out a total of four air strikes in the Amerli area, expanding its air campaign outside northern Iraq.
In doing so, it is supporting operations involving militia forces that previously fought against US troops in Iraq.
David Petraeus, a former commander-in-chief of US-led forces in Iraq, has warned against America becoming an "air force for Shiite militias".
Australia, Britain, France and the United States have all airdropped relief supplies to Amerli.
But Western aid for Amerli was slow in coming, with the burden of flying supplies and launching strikes in the area largely falling to Iraq's fledgling air force.
Meanwhile, pledges to provide arms to Iraq's Kurds, who are battling jihadists in northern and eastern Iraq, continued to pour in.
Germany will send anti-tank rocket launchers, rifles and hand grenades to support Kurdish forces, the German defence ministry announced on Sunday.
Chancellor Angela Merkel was to set out the plan at a special session of the lower house of parliament later on Monday, after which lawmakers were to hold a non-binding vote.
- At least 1,420 killed -
Kurdish forces backed by US air support have succeeded in clawing back some areas of the north that they lost to the jihadists last month.
The US military said Sunday that it had carried out an air strike against an armed IS vehicle near Iraq's largest dam, north of the militant-held northern city of Mosul.
Kurdish forces and elite federal troops retook the dam after briefly losing it to the jihadists earlier in August, securing the source of much of the power and irrigation water for the region around Iraq's second city.
The United Nations mission to Iraq said on Monday that violence in Iraq killed at least 1,420 people during August and wounded a further 1,370.
It said the figures did not include Anbar province, west of Baghdad, and that there were difficulties in verifying incidents in areas where there was fighting or which were outside government control.
IS and its allies control a large swathe of northeastern Syria as well as territory in Iraq.
Washington has said that operations in Syria will be needed to defeat IS, but has so far ruled out any cooperation with the Damascus regime against the jihadists.
It has, however, attempted to enlist the support of long-time foe Tehran, a key backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has urged "a united response led by the United States and the broadest possible coalition of nations" to combat IS.
Source: AFP