Baghdad launches Kirkuk operation

Kirkuk : The Iraqi army launched an operation to retake Kurdish-held positions around the disputed oil city of Kirkuk on Friday amid a bitter row with the Kurds over a vote for independence last month.

A senior Kurdish official said thousands of heavily armed fighters had been deployed to resist the offensive “at any cost” and called for international intervention with the federal government in Baghdad to prevent the confrontation worsening.

But a Kurdish pullback, as reported by local media, appeared to have avoided a military confrontation.

The Iraqi army and the Kurdish peshmerga have been key allies of the US-led coalition in its fight against the Islamic State (IS) group and the threat of armed clashes between them poses a major challenge for Western governments.

Ethnically divided but historically Kurdish-majority Kirkuk is one of several regions that peshmerga fighters took over from the Iraqi army in 2014 when the jihadists swept through much of northern and western Iraq.

Baghdad is bitterly opposed to Kurdish ambitions to incorporate the oil-rich province in its autonomous region in the north and has voiced determination to take it back.

“The Iraqi armed forces are advancing to retake their military positions that were taken over during the events of June 2014,” an army general said by telephone, asking not to be identified.

He said federal troops had already taken one base west of Kirkuk on Friday morning after peshmerga fighters withdrew during the night without a fight.

We will fight

The peshmerga’s Kirkuk commander, Jaafar Sheikh Mustafa, said his forces had withdrawn from areas they had recently entered during fighting against IS in the west of the province.

“We withdrew to our lines in the area around Kirkuk and we will defend the city in the event of an attack,” he told a news conference.

“If the Iraqi army advances, we will fight.”

Kurdish media reported that the peshmerga had withdrawn from around 72 square kilometres (28 square miles) of territory.

Sheikh Mustafa said there had been an attempt to negotiate an agreed disengagement of forces through Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi but it had been overruled by field commanders.

A top aide to Iraqi Kurdish leader Massud Barzani vowed that peshmerga forces would defend their positions “at any cost”. “Thousands of heavily armed peshmerga units are now completely in their positions around Kirkuk,” Hemin Hawrami said.

“Their order is to defend at any cost.”