Kurdish troops, aided by Yazidi fighters and backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition, have captured a key highway from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as part of their campaign to retake the city of Sinjar in northern Iraq, The New York Times reported Thursday.

As many as 7,500 Kurdish pesh merga fighters were moving on “three fronts to cordon off Sinjar City, take control of ISIL’s strategic supply routes, and establish a significant buffer zone to protect the city and its inhabitants from incoming artillery,” the security council of the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq said in a statement, using an acronym for the Islamic State. Describing the unfolding battle, Kurdish officials said that pesh merga forces had taken the village of Gabara, west of Sinjar, and had cut the supply line, Highway 47, the major east-west road that connects Syria to Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and that serves as a lifeline for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. … By midday, the combined forces said they had captured a 35-kilometer, or about 22-mile, stretch of the highway on either side of Sinjar, accomplishing one of the principal aims of the operation.

The capture of the highway could hinder efforts by ISIS to transfer arms and troops by forcing the terror group “to resort to less efficient smuggling routes,” the Times reported.

ISIS announced when it captured Sinjar last year that it was selling captured Yazidi women and children as “spoils of war.” Kurdish forces, backed by American airstrikes, made some advances against ISIS in the city of Sinjar last December, managing to free the majority of Yazidis who had been held in the city.

Earlier this year, IsraAid, the Israel-based NGO, provided aid to thousands of Yazidi who were displaced by ISIS. In Humanitarian Heroes in a Wrathful World, which was published in the November 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, Nathan Jeffay profiled IsraAid’s efforts to assist Syrian refugees in Europe.

[Photo: Kurdishstruggle / Flickr ]