IS attacks Iraq city of Kirkuk, power plant amid Mosul fight
KIRKUK, IRAQ >> Islamic State militants armed with assault rifles and explosives attacked targets in and around the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk early Friday, in an assault that appeared aimed at diverting Iraqi security forces from a massive offensive against the IS-held city of Mosul.
At least 13 workers, including four Iranians, were killed when IS militants stormed a power plant north of Kirkuk and then blew themselves up. A local TV reporter was killed by a sniper while covering the clashes in Kirkuk city, which were still raging after sundown.
Multiple explosions rocked the city, and gunfire rang out from the area around the provincial headquarters, where the fighting was concentrated. Smoke billowed over the city, and the streets were largely deserted out of fear of militant snipers.
IS said its fighters targeted the provincial headquarters, in a claim carried by its Aamaq news agency.
Three suicide bombers stormed a power plant in the town of Dibis, north of Kirkuk, killing 13 workers, including four Iranian technicians, before blowing themselves up as police arrived, said Maj. Ahmed Kader Ali, the Dibis police chief.
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. It was not immediately clear if Iranians were targeted in other attacks.
The Turkmeneli TV station, which had earlier shown live footage of smoke rising from outside the provincial headquarters, said in a news bulletin that one of its reporters, Ahmet Haceroglu, was killed by a sniper while covering the fighting.
There was no immediate word on casualties among other civilians or Kurdish forces in Kirkuk city. Police and hospital officials could not be reached for comment.
Kirkuk is some 170 kilometers (100 miles) from the Islamic Stateheld city of Mosul, where Iraqi forces have been waging a widescale offensive since Monday.
IS has in the past resorted to suicide bombings in and around Baghdad in response to battlefield losses elsewhere in the country. But the complex assault in Kirkuk more closely resembled those carried out by the Taliban in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Kirkuk, some 290 kilometers (180 miles) north of Baghdad, is an oil-rich city claimed by both Iraq’s central government and the largely autonomous Kurdish region. Kurdish forces assumed full control of Kirkuk in the summer of 2014, as Iraq’s army and police crumbled in the face of a lightning advance by IS.
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 early Friday, but that his forces repelled it.
He said IS maintains sleeper cells in Kirkuk and the surrounding villages. “We arrested one recently and he confessed,” he said, adding that the attackers may have posed as displaced civilians in order to infiltrate the city. Kirkuk province is home to hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the conflict.
Iraqi and Kurdish forces backed by a U.S.-led coalition launched a multi-pronged assault this week to retake Mosul and surrounding areas from IS. The operation is the largest undertaken by the Iraqi military since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Iraqi forces advanced as far as Bartella, a historically Christian town some 15 kilometers (nine miles) from Mosul’s outskirts, by Thursday.