URFA – Backed by the U.S.-led coalition’s air cover, Kurdistan’s Peshmerga army forces killed dozens of militants from the radical group of Islamic State (ISIS), thwarting an attempt by the group to break into the western countryside of Mosul in northwestern Iraq, military sources reported on Monday.“Dozens of Daesh (ISIS) terrorists have tried to infiltrate into the center of al-Kasak area (25 km west of Mosul), but the Peshmerga fighters, in coordination with the coalition warplanes, repelled their progress,” Colonel Kamiran Hawrami, an officer in the Peshmerga army of Iraqi Kurdistan, told reporters in Erbil.
Hawrami confirmed the some 60 attackers have been killed during clashes with the Peshmerga forces, pointing out “most of the militants’ corpses were captured by our forces.”
Speaking to ARA News in Erbil, media activist Rezan Hamo said that killing a large number of militants during the past few days is a sign of ISIS’s floundering in the battlefields.
“The terror group has received painful blows that paralyzed its movement in the region,” Hamo said, pointing out “a new phase of anti-ISIS battle will begin soon, especially after ISIS-led Paris attacks last Friday”, during which ate least 129 people have been killed.
Also, morale of the Kurdish forces in both Iraq and Syria is high, especially after recapturing the Yezidi district of Shingal in northern Iraq and the key town of al-Hawl in northeastern Syria from the terror group.
Over the past few days, the extremist group executed dozens of its militants who were accused of high treason and dissidence attempts from the group during fighting in the Yezidi areas in northern Iraq.