727 Kurd fighters have died in IS battle

SULAIMANIYAH: Six months into the offensive in Iraq, the autonomous Kurds said Wednesday they had lost more than 700 fighters and argued the burden of hosting a million displaced civilians was becoming unsustainable. Since the Islamic State group launched a devastating offensive from Syria on June 9, Iraq’s Kurds have been involved in battles along a front line stretching more than 1,000 km. A statement from the region’s military forces, known as the peshmerga, said 727 members of the Kurdish security forces had been killed and 3,564 wounded since June 10. The dead and wounded included “officers, non-commissioned officers, members of the Asayish (intelligence agency), of the police and some peshmerga veterans,” it said. The peshmerga ministry said 34 members of the Kurdish security forces are also still reported as missing. The last overall toll released by an official Kurdish source was on August 8, when the regional presidency’s chief of staff Fuad Hussein said 150 peshmerga had been killed. Wednesday’s figures do not include casualties sustained in Iraq by Kurdish fighters from armed groups based in Turkey, Syria and Iran who have joined the anti-IS war effort. Jabbar Yawar, the peshmerga ministry’s secretary general, told AFP that only 11 of the Iraqi Kurds who had joined the battle against IS fighters in the Syrian border town of Kobani had been wounded and none killed. AFP