Relief of Sinjar Mountain
DANA PITTARD
WITH REMARKS FROM WES BRYANT
August 2014
The ISIS attacks against Erbil and their offensive momentum in Kurdistan were temporarily thwarted by our Embassy Strike Cell. To reinforce our success in northern Iraq, General Austin requested I send my deputy, Brigadier General Castellvi, to Erbil along with a small command and control team of ten personnel.
The team was to coordinate directly with our U.S. Special Forces who were already embedded up north, along with the senior Kurdish military and political leadership. It was a wise move that would pay huge dividends over the next few months.
ISIS continued to aggressively conduct offensive operations throughout Iraq and Syria. One of their most significant objectives was around Sinjar Mountain in northern Iraq, southwest of Mosul—the same region we’d witnessed the horrible massacre of the eighty Yazidi men. To avoid the brutal and murderous ISIS fighters, Kurdish and Yazidi civilians had since fled to higher ground on Sinjar Mountain. ISIS forces trapped them there, cutting off any escape. The plight of the Kurdish and Yazidi civilians resulted in calls for assistance from around the world.
We closely tracked reports that at least 20,000 civilians were trapped on or around Sinjar Mountain. We were getting hundreds of cell phone calls from Kurds and Yazidis hemmed in by ISIS on the mountain who had numerous American and European contacts. The situation on Sinjar Mountain had the possibility of turning into a full-blown humanitarian crisis. The story was quickly picked up by international media and made global news.
President Obama authorized a special operations team to deploy to Sinjar Mountain in order to ascertain if humanitarian airdrops were necessitated and to assess how many refugees needed to be evacuated. Shortly after that, we worked with the Combined Forces Air Component Commander, Lieutenant General “Kid” Hesterman, and his team to conduct humanitarian parachute airdrops.
The humanitarian airdrops were coordinated and controlled with help from JTACs at the SOTF-I as well as the special operations task force operating in the north. The drops were very successful. The U.S. coalition along with Iraq’s small Air Force were able to get aid to thousands of Yazidi and Kurdish villagers who’d fled to Sinjar Mountain under the heavy ISIS assault.1
To oversee the relief and evacuation of the refugees, CENTCOM had formed a joint task force led by the MARCENT commander Lieutenant General Ken McKenzie. Unfortunately for them (but fortunately for those thousands surrounded by ISIS), by the time that joint task force was formed we received indications that most of the Kurdish and Yazidi refugees had already been evacuated by the YPG (Syrian Kurds).2 For the previous ten days, the Syrian Kurds had been evacuating an average of 2,000 refugees every day from Sinjar Mountain and transporting them to safer areas in Syria and far northern Iraq. Most of the refugees had been rescued.
Sinjar Mountain was a strategic mistake by ISIS. It resulted in President Obama finally authorizing airstrikes beyond the Abisellan Line and it renewed involvement by Kurdish forces that had previously been unwilling to go on the offensive. Once we received the updated authority from the president, the special operations task force near Erbil quickly stood up a small but deadly strike cell manned by their own JTACs as well as some from the SOTF-I. Their barrages of airstrikes combined with counterassaults by Kurdish Peshmerga forces finally helped break ISIS’ hold in the Sinjar region.
One thing was becoming increasingly obvious: it was going to be a long and arduous fight against ISIS, and our strike cells in Baghdad and Erbil would be playing a critical role.
Remarks from Wes Bryant
With all the frustration, anger, and confusion we’d felt about our mission since hitting the ground for the Iraq crisis in June, once ISIS began their campaign of inhumanity against the Yazidis and their all-out assault on the Kurds our mission drastically changed.
As soon as President Obama was briefed on the crisis on Sinjar Mountain and the ISIS forces advancing toward the Kurdish capital of Erbil where our special operations forces were embedded with the Peshmerga, his administration sent down a rapid shift in policy. Suddenly, we had the authority to act—and with a vengeance.
Our SOTF-I in Baghdad and the special operations task force in the north pushed teams to assess the refugee situation in the mountains and to assist with humanitarian airdrops and evacuation support. Along with that, America let loose airpower on ISIS in a far bigger way.
To relieve Sinjar Mountain and safeguard Erbil, the small special operations task force near Erbil established an ad hoc strike cell. We sent a couple of our SOF TACP JTACs, Marcus and Will, to assist their cell. Soon their coalition airstrikes were destroying ISIS forces in the region—hitting convoy after convoy of armored Humvees and other tactical vehicles that ISIS had captured from Iraqi and Kurdish military forces in their previous victories. They hammered every ISIS position found west of Erbil and around the Sinjar mountain range. The relief of the ISIS siege on Sinjar and the safeguarding of Erbil happened because of the efforts of the special operations strike cell in the north.
Shortly after the liberation of the Yazidis at Sinjar Mountain, President Obama gave a speech on the mission against ISIS in Iraq, where he reminded the world what it means for America to use its might for the good of humanity:
When we helped prevent the massacre of civilians trapped on a distant mountain, here’s what one of them said. “We owe our American friends our lives. Our children will always remember that there was someone who felt our struggle and made a long journey to protect innocent people.”3
ISIS was an insurgency unlike any we had ever faced. They propagated a widespread and systematic method of brutality in their war fighting and displayed tactical abilities and a level of organizational discipline unprecedented for an insurgency force. And they were the most fanatical group we’d ever seen. The fact that we were, at last, hunting and killing such an animalistic enemy on a large scale was satisfying to us all on a primal level.