QAYYARA (Iraq): The militant Islamic State (IS) group launched a major attack on the city of Kirkuk on Friday as Iraqi and Kurdish forces pursued operations to seize territory around Mosul in preparation for an offensive on the group’s last major stronghold in Iraq.

The militant group’s assault on Kirkuk, which lies in an oil-producing region, killed 18 members of the security forces and workers at a power station outside the city, including two Iranians, a hospital source said.

Kirkuk is located east of Hawija, a pocket still under control of IS that lies between Baghdad and Mosul.

With air and ground support from the US-led coalition, Iraqi government forces captured eight villages south and southeast of Mosul. Kurdish forces attacking from the north and east also captured several villages, according to statements from their respective military commands overnight.

The offensive that started on Monday to capture Mosul is expected to become the biggest battle fought in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003.

US Defence Secretary Ash Carter said on Friday that Turkey and Iraq had reached an agreement in principle that could allow a Turkish role in the Mosul campaign.

The United Nations says Mosul could require the biggest humanitarian relief operation in the world, with worst-case scenario forecasts of up to a million people being uprooted.

About 1.5 million residents are still believed to be inside Mosul. IS has taken 550 families from villages around Mosul and is holding them close to some locations in the city, probably as human shields, a spokeswoman for the UN human rights office said in Geneva.

The fighting has forced 5,640 people to flee their homes so far from the vicinity of the city, the International Organisation for Migration said late on Thursday.

The Turkish Red Crescent said it was sending aid trucks to northern Iraq with food and humanitarian supplies for 10,000 people displaced by fighting around Mosul.

Roughly 5,000 US forces are in Iraq. More than 100 of them are embedded with Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces, advising commanders and helping them ensure coalition air power hits the right targets, officials say.

However, the Kurdish military command complained that air support wasn’t enough on Thursday.

Holed up

In Kirkuk, IS attacked several police buildings and a power station in the early hours of Friday and some of the attackers remained holed up in a mosque and an abandoned hotel.

The militants also cut the road between the city and the power station 30km to the north.

Several dozen fighters took part in the assault, according to security sources who couldn’t confirm a claim by IS that it had taken a Kurdish police officer hostage.

The assailants in Kirkuk came from outside the city, said the head of Iraq’s Special Forces, Lt Gen Talib Shaghati, speaking on a frontline east of Mosul.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi described the killing of the Iranian citizens in Kirkuk as “the last breath of terrorists in Iraq”.

At least eight militants were killed, either by blowing themselves up or in clashes with the security forces, the security sources said.

Kurdish forces had dislodged the militants from all the police and public buildings they had seized before dawn, they said.

Kurdish NRT TV footage showed machinegun fire hitting a drab two-floor building that used to be a hotel, and cars burning in a nearby street.

IS claimed the attacks in online statements, and authorities declared a curfew in the city where Kurdish forces were getting reinforcements.

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters took control of Kirkuk in 2014, after the Iraqi army withdrew from the region, fleeing an IS advance through northern and western Iraq.

On the frontline south of Mosul, thick black smoke lingered from oil wells that IS torched to evade air surveillance, in the region of Qayyara.

Published in Dawn, October 22nd, 2016

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