IS attacks Kirkuk to draw attention away from Mosul
POWER PLANT STORMED: IS militants kill 16, including 4 Iranians
ISLAMIC State militants armed with assault rifles and explosives attack targets in and around this northern Iraqi city yesterday in an assault that appeared aimed at diverting Iraqi security forces from a massive offensive against the ISheld city of Mosul.
At least 16 workers, including four Iranians, were killed when IS militants stormed a power plant north of here and then blew themselves up.
Multiple explosions rocked the oil-rich city, and gun battles were ongoing, said witnesses here, speaking on condition of anonymity as they were concerned for their safety. Much of the fighting was centred on a government compound here. Witnesses said the streets were largely deserted out of fear of militant snipers.
IS said its fighters targeted the provincial headquarters. The claim was carried by the IS-run Aamaq news agency.
Local Kurdish television channel Rudaw aired footage showing black smoke rising over the city as extended bursts of automatic gunfire rang out. It quoted the city’s governor Najmadin Karim as saying that the militants had not seized government buildings.
In the power plant attack, which took place in Dibis, a town north of
yesterday. here, three IS suicide bombers entered the facility and took 10 workers hostage, said Major Ahmed Kader Ali, the Dibis police chief.
The attackers asked to be taken to the Iranians who worked at the plant. One of the workers took them to the Iranians before escaping. The militants then killed the Iranians and the other workers, and detonated their explosive vests when police arrived, Ali said.
The city is 170km from the IS-held city of Mosul, where Iraqi forces have been waging a wide-scale offensive since Monday.
It is 290km north of Baghdad and southeast of Mosul. It is claimed by both Iraq’s central government and the country’s Kurdish region. Kurdish
at the site of an attack by Islamic State militants in Kirkuk, Iraq, forces assumed full control of the city in the summer of 2014, as Iraq’s army and police crumbled in the face of a lightning advance by IS.
Later on Friday, Rudaw TV said IS militants who took part in the attack here had been killed except for two who were holed up in a newly built hotel, which was damaged in the attack and from where they were battling Kurdish forces.
The city’s police commander Brigadier-General Khattab Omer said clashes were still underway, without providing further details. There was no word on casualties among civilians or Kurdish forces here, and the TV report could not be confirmed.
Kemal Kerkuki, a senior commander of Kurdish peshmerga forces west of here, said the town where his base was located outside the city also came under attack yesterday. The base is now under control.
He said IS maintained sleeper cells in the city 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 in the summer of 2014, capturing Mosul, the country’s second largest city. Agencies