41 Kurdish Families Captured by ISIS in Mosul

A Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) official from Iraq’s northern city of Mosul announced that 41 Kurdish families from the city have been captured by ISIS militants, following the families’ attempts to escape to the Kurdistan region, ekurd.net reports.
Saed Mamuzini told NRT TV the families had been captured in an ambush and had then been taken back to Mosul.
Since the ISIS takeover of Mosul on June 10, 2014, thousands of Kurdish families and others have escaped to the Kurdistan region.
According to Mamuzini, ISIS took the families hostage in revenge for the ISIS casualties sustained in Thursday clashes with Kurdish Peshmerga forces in the town of Sinjar, known as Shingal in Kurdish.
The town is 125 km west of Mosul, and it has been on the front lines of the fight against ISIS since the group launched an offensive on the predominately Kurdish Yazidi area in August 2014.
Although some amount of territory remains under ISIS control in Iraq as well as in Syria, Kurdish and Iraqi forces continue to make gains with support from Popular forces.
Preparations are also underway to retake the city of Mosul, which Peshmerga forces have now surrounded from the east, north, and west.