Iraq, Kurd troops in armed stand-off

Maryam Beik, Iraq - Thousands of Iraqi troops were locked in an armed stand-off with Kurdish forces in the disputed oil province of Kirkuk on Saturday as Washington scrambled to avert fighting between the key allies in the war against the IS.

Sunday 2.00am (23.00 GMT Saturday) was the deadline that the Kurds say Baghdad had set for their forces to surrender positions they took during the fightback against the IS over the past three years.

Armoured cars of the Iraqi army bearing the national flag were posted on the bank of a river on the southern outskirts of Kirkuk, an AFP photographer reported.

On the opposite bank, Kurdish peshmerga fighters were visible behind an earthen embankment topped with concrete blocks painted with the red, white green and yellow of the Kurdish flag.

“Our forces are not moving and are now waiting for orders from the general staff,” an Iraqi army officer said.

The two sides have been at loggerheads since the Kurds voted overwhelmingly for independence in a September 25 referendum that Baghdad rejected as illegal.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi has said there can be no further discussion of the Kurds’ demands to incorporate Kirkuk and other historically Kurdish-majority areas in their autonomous region until the independence vote is annulled.

He insisted on Thursday that he was ‘not going... to make war on our Kurdish citizens’.

But thousands of heavily armed troops and members of the Popular Mobilisation Force - paramilitary units largely made up of Iran-trained Shiite militias - have massed around Kirkuk.

They have already retaken a string of positions to the south of the city after Kurdish forces withdrew.

The Kurds have deployed thousands of peshmerga fighters to the area around Kirkuk itself and have vowed to defend the city ‘at any cost’.

Iraqi President Fuad Masum, was holding crisis talks in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said on Friday, “We are trying to tone everything down and to figure out how we go forward without losing sight of the enemy, and at the same time recognising that we have got to find a way to move forward.”