Control of the dam could give ISIS, which has threatened to march on Baghdad, the ability to flood major cities.

U.S. warplanes carried out on Saturday airstrikes in northern Iraq near the Mosul dam which was seized earlier this month by Sunni fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), CNN reported citing the Kurdish news agency Rudaw.

The joint military operation between the U.S. and Iraq, which aims at retaking control of the country’s largest hydroelectric dam, began with U.S. fighter jets carrying out strikes on the seized area.

The mission, which was planned in advance, will carry on with Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces joining the mission on the ground.

ISIS seized control of Iraq’s largest dam north of their hub of Mosul earlier this month and took control over the supply of water and electricity in a vast area.

Control of the dam could give ISIS, which has threatened to march on Baghdad, the ability to flood major cities.

ISIS fighters, who had already been running large swathes of neighboring Syria, launched a blistering offensive on June 9 that saw them capture Mosul, Iraq’s second city, and move into much of the country’s Sunni heartland.

 
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