IS militants storm power plant in bid to divert assault on Mosul

ISLAMIC STATE militants have attacked targets in and around the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, in an assault apparently aimed at diverting Iraqi security forces from a massive offensive against the IS stronghold of Mosul.

At least 13 workers, including four Iranians, were killed when militants stormed a power plant north of Kirkuk and blew themselves up.

Multiple explosions rocked the city and gun battles were continuing, said witnesses in Kirkuk, with much of the fighting centred on a government compound. The streets were largely deserted out of fear of militant snipers.

IS, also known as Daesh, said its fighters had targeted the provincial headquarters.

Kurdish television channel Rudaw aired footage showing black smoke rising over the city as extended bursts of automatic gunfire rang out.

It quoted Kirkuk governor Najmadin Karim as saying that the militants had not seized any government buildings.

In the power plant attack in the town of Dibis, three IS suicide bombers entered the facility and took 13 workers hostage, said police chief Major Ahmed Kader Ali.

The attackers asked to be taken to Iranians who worked at the plant, and the militants then killed the Iranians and other workers, then detonated their explosive vests when police arrived, Maj Ali said.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi condemned the Kirkuk assault, which he said killed four Iranians and wounded three others, according to the official IRNA news agency.

Kirkuk is 100 miles from Mosul, where Iraqi forces are attempting to reclaim the city.

Oil-rich Kirkuk is 180 miles north of Baghdad and south-east of Mosul. It is claimed by both Iraq’s central government and the country’s Kurdish region.

Kurdish forces assumed full control of Kirkuk in summer of 2014 as Iraq’s army and police crumbled in the face of a lightning advance by IS.

Rudaw TV said all IS militants who took part in the Kirkuk attack had been killed except for two who were holed up in a newly built hotel, which was damaged in the attack, and fighting off Kurdish forces.

Kemal Kerkuki, a senior commander of Kurdish peshmerga forces west of Kirkuk, said the town where his base is located outside the city also came under attack, but that the base was under control.

He said IS had sleeper cells in Kirkuk and surrounding villages. “We arrested one recently and he confessed,” he said, adding that the attackers may have posed as displaced civilians to infiltrate the city.

Kirkuk province has absorbed hundreds of thousands of displaced people from neighbouring provinces since IS overran wide stretches of northern and western Iraq.

Iraqi and Kurdish forces backed by a US-led coalition launched a multi-pronged assault this week to retake Mosul and surrounding areas. The operation is the largest by the Iraqi military since the 2003 invasion.

Iraqi officials said they had advanced as far as the town of Bartella, nine miles from Mosul’s outskirts, by Thursday.

Lieutenant General Talib Shaghati, of Iraq’s elite troops, insisted the special forces had “full control”. He said his personnel were clearing explosives and contending with some snipers.

We arrested one recently and he confessed Kemal Kerkuki, a Kurdish senior commander, on the threat of IS sleeper cells