Iraqi Forces Retake All Oil Fields in Disputed Areas as Kurds Retreat
To the south, the Iraqi military command in Baghdad said Iraqi troops had taken over several disputed
areas in Diyala Province held since 2014 by pesh merga forces, who withdrew early Tuesday.
In the northern city of Mosul, a commander of Iraqi military units said in a telephone interview on Tuesday
that the Iraqi government was negotiating with Kurdish leaders on a Kurdish withdrawal from disputed areas around Mosul near the Kurdish autonomous region.
Iraqi launched that He played it all wrong.
At a news conference in Baghdad on Tuesday, Mr. Abadi said the referendum "is finished
and has become a thing of the past." Mr. Barzani and other supporters of the referendum "took a very bad situation and made it worse," said Denise Natali, a Middle East specialist at the National Defense University in Baghdad.
A senior commander of Kurdish forces defending oil fields outside the city of Dibis, about 30 miles northwest of Kirkuk, said in a telephone interview
that his troops had pulled out late Monday night as Iraqi troops closed in.
Elsewhere in Iraq on Tuesday, Iraqi militia fighters allied with government troops took control of disputed areas in
and around Sinjar, a northern region populated by Yazidis, a religious minority.
In a swift and largely nonviolent operation that came a day after Iraqi forces reclaimed the contested city of Kirkuk from the Kurdish separatists, Baghdad’s troops occupied all oil-producing facilities
that the separatists had held for three years, and which had become critical to the Kurdish autonomous region’s economic vitality.
