Iraqi Kurds 'fully control Kirkuk' as army flees

           

   

Iraqi Kurdish forces say they have taken full control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk as the army flees before an Islamist offensive nearby.

"The whole of Kirkuk has fallen into the hands of peshmerga," Kurdish spokesman Jabbar Yawar told Reuters. "No Iraq army remains in Kirkuk now."

Kurdish fighters are seen as a bulwark against Sunni Muslim insurgents who seized towns in the region this week. The fall of the city of Mosul sent shock waves across the Middle East.

Kirkuk and the surrounding province of Tamim are at the heart of a political and economic dispute between Iraq's Arabs and Kurds.


• Under Saddam Hussein's programme of "Arabisation", Kurds were driven from Kirkuk and replaced with settlers from the south, and the Iraqi government continues to assert control over nearby oil fields, with the backing of the local Turkmen community

• The Kurdistan Regional Government, which administers three provinces to the north-east, is pushing for Arabisation to be reversed

• In May 2013, Kurdish fighters took up positions on the outskirts of Kirkuk after Iraqi security forces were redeployed to deal with Sunni militants elsewhere

• A census and referendum on the affiliation of the province has been repeatedly delayed by the broader political crisis in Iraq

Led by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), the insurgents are believed to be planning to push further south, to the capital Baghdad and regions dominated by Iraq's Shia Muslim majority, whom they regard as "infidels".

But it appears the insurgents want to avoid tangling with Iraqi Kurds in provinces bordering Nineveh province where Mosul is located, because they are a more cohesive fighting force, the BBC's Jim Muir reports from Kurdish-run Irbil.

A new insurgent offensive could come from the west, where they control the city of Falluja, 69km (43 miles) from Baghdad, our correspondent adds.

Iraq's parliament is due to debate a call by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki for a state of emergency.

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The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has 3,000 to 5,000 fighters, and grew out of an al-Qaeda-linked organisation in Iraq
ISIS has exploited the standoff between the Iraqi government and the minority Sunni Arab community, which complains that Shia PM Nouri Maliki is monopolising power
It has already taken over Ramadi and Falluja, but taking over Mosul is a far greater feat than anything the movement has achieved so far, and will send shockwaves throughout the region
The organisation is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - an obscure figure regarded as a battlefield commander and tactician. He was once the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, one of the groups that later became ISIS.