Kurdish forces have been carrying out a major assault to try to retake the northeast Iraqi towns of Jalula and Sa'dya from Islamic State (IS) militants.
It comes as US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the threat posed by the "barbaric" IS extremists, who have seized control of large parts of Syria and Iraq, was "beyond anything we've seen".
The group, which beheaded American journalist James Foley in response to US airstrikes in Iraq, was "beyond just a terrorist group", Mr Hagel said.
A Kurdish peshmerga fighter "They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess. They are tremendously well-funded," he added.
Sky's Alex Crawford, reporting from the outskirts of Jalula, said the operation was being carried out by the Kurdish military's elite counter-terrorism unit, backed up by peshmerga forces.
James Foley in Libya in 2011 She said the towns, near the Iranian border and the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, had been under the control of IS insurgents for more than two months.
The Kurdish forces have already taken back a major checkpoint, which the Sunni militants had controlled.
Alex Crawford said: "What is significant about this assault is that they (the Kurds) are doing this pretty much entirely on their own.
"They've had very little air support. There is no evidence of any outside weaponry, military hardware to back them up."
A rough outline of the caliphate declared by IS militants Meanwhile, US airstrikes in Syria - where Mr Foley disappeared in November 2012 - have not been ruled out.
When asked about that possibility, Mr Hagel said Washington was "exploring all options".
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, also did not discount attacks on IS fighters in Syria.
Militants vowed to attack US targets in another video clip "This is an organisation that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated," he said at a briefing.
"To your question, can they be defeated without addressing that part of their organisation which resides in Syria? The answer is no.
"That will have to be addressed on both sides of what is essentially at this point a non-existent border."
The fighter who killed James Foley Also, at least 30 people were reportedly killed when a Shia militia opened fired inside a Sunni mosque in Baquba, Diyala province.
IS, which was formerly known as ISIS, declared an Islamic state, or caliphate, covering large parts of the two countries earlier this year.
Michael Scheuer, a former CIA senior officer who ran operations against al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, has told Sky News defeating IS will require an "enormous" number of Western troops on the ground which would mean an "enormous bloodbath".
He said: "It's a greatly bigger problem than we've seen before, it's better armed, it's better led and certainly more vicious than al Qaeda was in the initial years."
US President Barack Obama has insisted the scope of the US strikes will remain limited, while Prime Minister David Cameron has said Britain will not fight another war in Iraq.
A criminal investigation has now been opened into Mr Foley's murder, which was recorded by the militants in a video that emerged earlier this week.
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