The Islamic State executed scores of its own militants because they recently abandoned their headquarters in Sinjar rather than resist a coalition of Kurdish forces who have retaken the strategically important Iraqi city.

Some 73 ISIS militants were executed by firing squad for abandoning the fight that took place last Thursday and Friday, a Kurdish official told reporters in Iraqi Kurdistan.

U.S. forces laid the groundwork with a series of airstrikes and Kurdish forces retook the city Friday morning with little to no resistance, liberating it from more than 15 months of ISIS rule and cutting off one of the group’s major supply lines.

Kurdish forces said they intercepted radio traffic between ISIS fighters leading up to their advance suggesting some of them were deserting, and said they heard an ISIS leader “berating” his men and threatening to behead deserters.

“There was no resistance — I mean zero,” a German filmmaker embedded in the front line with Syrian Kurdish fighters told The New York Times. “We ran down the hill, like in a raid, and the whole time I saw just one dead Daesh [ISIS] fighter.”

ISIS overrun Sinjar in 2014, killing, raping and enslaving large numbers of the Yazidis who had lived there. Mass graves have been found containing the bodies of mostly older women considered too old to be ISIS sex slaves.

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