Attention has once again focused on Sinjar, the strategically significant and Yazidi-dominated area in northwestern Iraq that has long been a tinderbox of ethnic, sectarian and regional rivalries. The United States has been quietly and thus far unsuccessfully working to calm it.

The Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) are closing in on the area as they clear the Iraqi-Syrian border of Islamic State fighters, part of the ongoing operation to liberate Mosul. 

The developments have prompted worries of a Turkish intervention amid claims that the Shiite militias are working in concert with Yazidi groups affiliated with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is carrying out a separate battle inside Turkey for Kurdish self-rule. There is even overwrought chatter about an Iranian-Turkish dust-up, all of which would disrupt the US-led campaign to defeat IS in Iraq and Syria.

Nawaf Ashur, a Yazidi journalist and fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, told Al-Monitor that after driving IS out of the villages of Kassab and Tal Binad, the PMU liberated the village of Kocho with the help of the newly formed Yazidi Kocho battalion. “They are moving very rapidly,” he said.