By Mitchell Prothero

McClatchy Foreign Staff August 4, 2014

DOHUK, Iraq — Kurdish military forces scrambled Monday to reinforce their positions in northern Iraq, including an unusual request to the United States for military assistance, one day after militants from the Islamist State routed Kurdish troops from three key towns near northern Iraq’s largest dam.

Kurdish pershmerga militia could be seen streaming out of Dohuk, the administrative capital for one of the three regions that make up the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, and a visit to military barracks in this city found them largely empty.

Local television reports described troops massing to bolster front lines 30 miles away, and while there was no noticeable panic in this mountain city, it was clear officials were moving quickly to overcome a surprising defeat over the weekend for the peshmerga, whose troops are reputed to be the best in Iraq.

Officials conceded that two towns, Kummar and Sinjar, remained in Islamic State hands and that tens of thousands of Yazidis, a Kurdish religious minority that for years has been targeted by radical Islamists, had sought refuge in Kurdistan.

A third city, Wana, which sits on the Tigris River, was retaken by Kurdish forces, however.

Control of another key location, the Mosul Dam, which controls much of the water in northern Iraq, was still being contested. Kurdish officials said they remained in control of the site, and U.S. defense and intelligence officials in Washington said they had no reason to doubt that assertion.

But the U.S. officials also cautioned that the situation changes by the hour. “The dam is certainly contested,” one defense official said. He declined to be identified by name because he was not authorized to speak to a reporter about the events.

One Sunni Muslim man reached by telephone in Sinjar said Monday that the militants were rounding up and executing local government and municipal workers.

“They have a checkpoint 50 feet from my house and I can see them arresting people right now,” he said, declining to give his name for fear of reprisal. “Last night they arrested and executed four of my cousins because they worked for the municipality, and already they have begun destroying the homes of the people who fled.”

Another resident of Sinjar said that Yazidi families who had been unable to flee were being harassed and in some cases executed, and that it appeared as though militants were abducting large numbers of small children from each family.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/08/04/23...l#storylink=cpy

alert!!!

He said it was ironic that the Islamic State had captured millions of dollars worth of modern U.S. weaponry as its forces overran Iraqi military bases in recent weeks. “So now we have to beg the Americans for modern weapons to fight the Islamic State . . . because they’re equipped with modern American weapons they took from the Iraqi government,” he said.

But the Iraqi army fled northern Iraq in early June in the face of the Islamic State, and since then only the Kurds’ peshmerga militia has confronted extremist forces in the north.

Mustafa said U.S. officials in Irbil were receptive to the request, which he did not detail. He said that they had promised to “intently look into the case.”



Look intently???