Iraqi Kurdish forces recapture strategic village from ISIL

The Kurds are determined to keep hold of the village because losing it would mean opening up Erbil to a possible ISIL invasion. A major highway to Iraq’s second city, Mosul, also passes through the village, which lies on the banks of the Tigris River.

One commander told Al Jazeera that ISIL fighters in Sultan Abdallah seemed to have limited firepower, mainly old AK-47s or other weapons “from the Iran-Iraq War 25 years ago.”

The Kurdish victory in Sultan Abdallah came the same day a group of Yazidi fighters attacked another key Iraqi village held by ISIL along the Syrian border, sources told Al Jazeera. The attack on Buhania, a village just outside the town of Rabia, was apparently part of the group's efforts to track down the reportedly hundreds of Yazidi girls and women abducted by ISIL during their conquests in Iraq.

Hundreds of fighters from Iraq’s Yazidi minority — whose territory has been assaulted by ISIL fighters over the past few months — are assisting the peshmerga in their operations against ISIL in and around the Yazidi's ancestral homeland of the Sinjar mountains.

But Kurdish sources told Al Jazeera they had not known about the Yazidi plan to attack on Friday and were unhappy their allies had acted unilaterally. Kurdish sources said the Yazidi fighters killed an unknown number of people in the village and took many others away, including a local imam.

The latest clashes mark a slight shift in momentum after a renewed push by ISIL in the north in August that drove Kurdish forces back towards the capital of their autonomous region. That surge helped spark a U.S.-led campaign of airstrikes against ISIL that has bolstered efforts against the group.

Iraqi soldiers and police, Kurdish forces, Shia militias and anti-ISIL Sunni tribesmen have succeeded in regaining some ground from the Sunni ISIL insurgency. But large parts of Iraq, including three major cities, remain outside Baghdad's control.

Violence in Iraq killed more than 15,000 civilians and security personnel in 2014, government figures released on Thursday showed, making it one of the deadliest years since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.