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		</div><p>A network of tunnels built by Islamic State has been discovered under the Iraqi town of Sinjar, complete with sleeping quarters, wired with electricity and fortified with sandbags.</p>
<p>Footage obtained by the Associated Press shows militants stashed boxes of US-made ammunition, medicines and copies of the Quran on shelves.</p>
<p>The tunnels were uncovered by Kurdish forces that took the city in north-western Iraq earlier this month after more than a year of IS rule.</p>
<p>Shamo Eado, a Sinjar commander from the Iraqi Kurdish fighters known as peshmerga, said: “We found between 30 and 40 tunnels inside Sinjar. It was like a network inside the city.”</p>
<p>He added: “Daesh dug these trenches in order to hide from air strikes and have free movement underground as well as to store weapons and explosives. This was their military arsenal.”</p>
<p>The video, shot by a freelancer touring the town with Kurdish fighters, shows two tunnels running for several hundred metres, each starting and ending from houses, through holes knocked in walls or floors.</p>
<p>The narrow tunnels, carved in the rock apparently with pneumatic drills or other handheld equipment, are just tall enough for a man to stand in.</p>
<p>Rows of sandbags line sections of the walls, electrical wires power fans and lights and metal braces reinforce the ceilings.</p>
<p>One section of the tunnel resembled a bunker. Dusty copies of the Quran sit above piles of blankets and pillows. Prescription drugs, painkillers and antibiotics, lie scattered along the floor.</p>
<p>In another section of the tunnel, the footage shows stocks of ammunition, including American-made cartridges and bomb-making tools.</p>
<p>IS has been digging tunnels for protection and movement throughout the territory it controls in Iraq and Syria, even before the US-led coalition launched its campaign of air strikes against the group more than a year ago.</p>
<p>“This has been part of Isis’ strategy from the very beginning,” said Lina Khatib, a senior research associate at the Arab Reform initiative, a Paris-based think-tank.</p>
<p>“Isis has been well prepared for this kind of intervention.”</p>
<p>Islamic State took control of Sinjar in August 2014, killing and capturing thousands of the town’s mostly Yazidi residents.</p>
<p>Yazidis, a religious minority in Iraq with roots that date back to ancient Mesopotamia, are considered heretics by IS.</p>
<p>Hundreds of women are thought to still be in IS captivity, and those who have escaped say many Yazidi women are forced to convert to Islam and marry IS fighters.</p>
<p>After pushing IS out of Sinjar, peshmerga officials and local residents uncovered two mass graves in the area.</p>
<p>One, not far from the city centre, is estimated to hold 78 elderly women’s bodies.</p>
<p>The second grave, uncovered about nine miles west of Sinjar, contained between 50 and 60 bodies of men, women and children.</p>
<p>Mr Eado said that as Kurdish forces clear Sinjar of explosives, he expects to find more tunnels and evidence of atrocities.</p>
<p>“It’s just a matter of time,” he said.</p>
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