Iraqi forces demand Kurdish troops pull out of Kirkuk area

BAGHDAD — Iraqi forces have demanded that Kurdish troops withdraw from oil fields and military bases around the contested city of Kirkuk, Kurdish officials and a senior militia leader said Friday, leading to a tense standoff around the city.

Kurdish peshmerga soldiers rallied to protect Kirkuk on Thursday night, as interior ministry troops and Shiite militias mobilized nearby. Volunteer and retired fighters bolstered the lines. Several positions were taken over by Iraqi forces, however, with Kurdish officers saying they received orders to withdraw.

The Kirkuk area, with about 10 percent of Iraq’s oil reserves, has long been contested between Baghdad and Irbil, but the province has become even more of a flash point since Kurdistan voted in favor of independence in a referendum last month.

At the center of the military conflagration are areas that forces loyal to the central government in Baghdad occupied before the Islamic State’s advance in 2014, but lost as Iraqi forces collapsed en masse in northern Iraq.

Kurdistan sees Kirkuk — ethnically and religiously mixed and home to Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, Assyrian Christians, Sunnis and Shiites — as a historically Kurdish city where demographics were shifted by a campaign of “Arabization” under Iraq’s former dictatorial ruler, Saddam Hussein. Baghdad contests that claim.

Relations between Baghdad and Irbil have deteriorated in recent weeks after the semiautonomous government in the north defied the vehement opposition of Baghdad, as well as that of the United States and its neighbors, to hold a vote on independence. Baghdad has blocked international flights to Irbil in retaliation and has threatened to take over border crossings.

“I call on our brothers of the peshmerga to hand over these areas and not to drag the country into internal war,” said the militia commander, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.