some suggestion you could be near a mine of some sort. that has slowed the process of peshmerga. they do now appear to be closer toward the city center as there is minimal gun fire at this stage. i heard one loud sustained burst. i don t know if it is celebratory or if isis is fighting back. they are still inside the city. i heard from an official and fighting is all around. a volunteer i spoke to called jason talks about how they were treating the patients. the key question is how can you get people back who live there? you have to clear the mines and rebuild the city. this is a yazidi population. many of them are weary. the question is how many isis fighters are still hiding out.
killed. plus, we ve had major breaking news about the battle for sinjar. to talk about all this, inside the army of terror, michael weiss and cnn military analyst and retired u.s. army major general james spider marks. thanks for being here. nick paton walsh gave us this breaking news. he was in sinjar earlier today. it sounds as though it s been liberated from isis. how big of a deal is this? this say pretty big deal. it led to the siege of sinjar mountain which isis was using that as an opportunity to commit genocide against the yazidi ethnic minority. the crucial struggle is highway 47, this binds it together, this is the route 66 of isis. if that can be taken. as of yesterday, it seemed as though 35 miles had been i
careerly ran across isis and certain pockets there. those clashes continued. we eventually joined the peshmerga down on the street level, down there you can see the intense damage inflicted on that city, both by coalition air strikes but isis suicide bombers as well. so little left to go back to for the yazidi population. so many booby traps left at the side of the road. we heard from a volunteer, jason, working as a medic and seeing kurds die right in front of him during this brutal fight, there are over a dozen he d seen just in the previous few hours. it s frankly a death trap at this stage. the guns have fallen silent behind me now. there may still be isis inside the city. there may be booby traps still. the question is how swift has the victory been, and when can the yazidis move back to their town of sinjar. we want to bring in lieutenant general mark
strategic city. it s a massive offensive. thousands of kurdish perg mehera fighters are leading the charge. plumes of smoke blacken the skies as coalition bombs target from the air. the strategy is attack the city from three sides. our senior international correspondent nick paton walsh is on the ground for us in iraq. he s very near to this whole sinjar area, closely following what s going upon nick, describe what you have seen because i understand it is very dramatic. from the early hours this morning, wolf, we saw an enormous column of peshmerga we followed around towards the west of the city. that s key because it seems that s where much of the advance today were made by them. their main objective, the peshmerga want to retake sinjar, want to reverse what happened to the yazidi population that happened last year when isis
larger but frankly it may be months away. remember the scenes we saw last year when isis attacked that whole sin jjar area and we saw these children basically being thrown into helicopters, yazidi children, the yazidis really assaulted by these forces. it s been a brutal situation. how important is this town sinjar in and of itself? sinjar in itself is important for a strategic region because it sits on a vital route for the coalition. they talked about the need to cut it off to prevent the flow of fighters and also the black oil trade which many say is key to isis financing but it s symbolic because of the brutality against the yazidis. remember, many of them put in captivity, slavery to some degree. tens of thousands living in mt. sinjar in the freezing cold now, close as they can be to sinjar, their hometown.