Kurdish forces left and let Shia-led militia move in, says local Yazidi commander, a day after peshmerga withdrew from Kirkuk

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Kurdish fighters have lost more territory in Iraq, a day after Iraqi forces pushed them out of the disputed oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

The commander of local Yazidi fighters, Masloum Shingali, said Kurdish forces had left the town of Sinjar before dawn on Tuesday, allowing Shia-led militia fighting with Iraqi forces to move into the town.

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Shingali said there had been no clashes and that the Kurdish forces left immediately. “They didn’t want to fight,” he said.

The town’s mayor, Mahma Khalil, said the Popular Mobilisation Forces, a predominantly Shia militia coalition, were securing Sinjar.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Popular Mobilisation Forces members celebrate on the outskirts of Kirkuk on Tuesday. Photograph: Alaa Al-Marjani/Reuters

Iraqi troops pushed their Kurdish allies in the battle against Islamic State out of Kirkuk on Monday, seizing oilfields and other facilities as tensions soar over last month’s Kurdish vote for independence.

Iraqi forces also took control of the Bai Hasan and Avana oilfields north-west of Kirkuk on Tuesday, after seizing the Baba Gurgur, Jambur and Khabbaz fields the previous day, a senior military officer told Reuters. Oil officials in Baghdad said all the fields were operating normally.

The Pentagon sought to play down the scale of clashes between the two sides on Monday, after forces loyal to the central government in Baghdad rapidly took over nearly all of Kirkuk, and Kurdish forces abandoned their positions, retreating to nearby oilfields. Video footage showed streams of Kurdish refugees leaving Kirkuk in cars.

Thousands of civilians returned to Kirkuk on Tuesday, a day after fleeing for fear of potential clashes.

Baghdad’s move came three weeks after the referendum on Kurdish independence, which included the ethnically diverse city, a contentious move that Baghdad viewed as effective annexation.

The peshmerga withdrawal delivered decisive military and political gains to Baghdad and a devastating blow to the Kurdish region’s de facto president, Massoud Barzani, who had staked much of his legacy on the referendum and aimed to use it as a stepping stone to consolidate Kurdish autonomy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Iraqi families fleeing Kirkuk province cross a Kurdish checkpoint in Altun Kupri. Photograph: Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images

The north-western town of Sinjar is infamous as the site of one of Islamic State’s worst atrocities. It killed thousands of Yazidi men and abducted thousands of women and girls as sex slaves in 2014.

Tens of thousands of civilians fled into the nearby mountains in appalling conditions, helping to trigger US intervention against the jihadis.

The Yazidis are Kurdish-speaking, but follow their own non-Muslim faith that earned them the hatred of the Sunni Muslim extremists of Isis.

Following the 2014 exodus, many Yazidis volunteered to fight against Isis, either in their own militias or those sponsored by the Kurds or the Iraqi government.

Hashed al-Shaabi, a paramilitary force made up largely of Shia militias trained by Iran said Yazidi fighters in its ranks had deployed in Sinjar.

Kurdish forces took the town from Isis in 2015.

Sinjar and Kirkuk form part of a swath of historically Kurdish-majority territory that the Kurds want to incorporate in their autonomous region in the north, against the wishes of Baghdad.

The Kurds took over parts of the territory in 2014 when many units of the Iraqi army disintegrated in the face of the jihadis’ rapid advance through areas north and west of Baghdad.

Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report