"Peshmerga forces have reached Mount Sinjar, the siege on the mountain has been lifted," Masrour Barzani, head of the Iraqi Kurdish region's national security council, told reporters from an operations centre near the border with Syria on Thursday, according to Aljazeera.
"All those Yazidis that were trapped on the mountain are now free," Barzani said, but added that the Peshmerga had not yet begun to evacuate them.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi Yazidis, Christians and Turkmen have been uprooted from communities they have lived in for millennia by IS militants who raided towns and villages across Iraq last summer with residents told to leave, convert or die.
The broken siege comes amid reports US-led airstrikes in northern Iraq have killed several IS leaders over the past several weeks.
"I can confirm that since mid-November, targeted coalition airstrikes successfully killed multiple senior and mid-level leaders," Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said in a statement.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said training Iraqi security forces to fight IS will take years: "We believe that the loss of these key leaders degrades [IS] ability to command and control current operations against Iraqi Security Forces, including Kurdish and other local forces in Iraq."
