US Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles taxi the runway after landing at Incirlik Air Base, Turkey. Six F-15Es are deployed in support of anti-ISIS operations in Iraq and Syria.
Kurdish and allied forces have seized control of the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar from ISIS.
The town is important strategically as it sits on the main road between the areas occupied by ISIS in Iraq and Syria. It will be harder now for ISIS to move men and resources between the two countries.
Sinjar is also important symbolically, as it was where ISIS inflicted the first serious defeat on Kurdish forces in decades, in August 2014. The militants then proceeded to massacre men from the Yezidi minority, and enslave their women and children.
But the town has been devastated.
“The odd thing about liberated Sinjar, is that there isn’t much to liberate,” says Ben Kesling, who’s there for the Wall Street Journal. Kesling happens to be a former Marine infantry officer. “The Islamic State essentially chased away, or enslaved and took away the civilians who were living there.”
“When you go into Sinjar proper it’s almost like a ghost town,” adds Kesling. “Things are just destroyed, by air strikes, by fighting. There’s rubble in the streets. And the only people in the town when I was there were Yezidi fighters who have taken back their home town.”
“There wasn’t really any sign of any civilians.”
Booby traps and improvised explosive devices litter many neighborhoods. There may also be a few ISIS stragglers stuck there.
Kesling says the town was surrounded on three sides, encouraging the ISIS fighters to flee out of the fourth side, into the desert to the south. “Once they were moving out of that fourth open side, coalition air strikes were tasked with mopping up anything that came out of that one end of the city.”