Dubai: Suspected Daesh militants attacked several buildings and a power station in the northern Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk in the early hours of Friday, killing eight people, and some of the attackers remained holed up in a mosque and a hotel, security sources said.
Six members of the security forces were killed along with two Iranians who were part of a team carrying out maintenance in a power station outside the city, according to a hospital source.
At least eight militants were also killed, either by blowing themselves up or in clashes with the security forces, the security sources said. Kurdish forces dislodged the militants from all buildings they had seized except a hotel and a mosque, where fighting continues.
Residents in the city said they had been hearing explosions since 1am.
Daesh claimed the attacks in online statements, and authorities declared a curfew in the city.
Crude oil production facilities were not targeted and the power supply continued uninterrupted in the city, they said.
Armed local residents and volunteers were pouring into areas to fend off the Daesh attacks, news website Rudaw reported.
“It was expected that [Daesh] sleeper cells would make a move one day in Kirkuk now that the Mosul offensive has started, and they want to boost their own morale this way,” Kirkuk Governor Najmaldin Karim told the news service.
Kurdish Peshmerga fighters took control of Kirkuk in 2014, after the Iraqi army withdrew from the region, fleeing an Daesh advance through northern and western Iraq.
The attacks in Kirkuk came four days after Kurdish and Iraqi forces started an offensive with the backing of a US-led coalition to take back Mosul, the terrorist group’s last major city stronghold in Iraq.
Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, meanwhile, called on forces taking part in the Mosul offensive to protect civilians as they fight their way towards the Daesh-held city.
An aide to the reclusive Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, reading out a Friday sermon from the cleric, said, “We stress today upon our beloved fighters, as we have before on many occasions, that they exercise the greatest degree of restraint in dealing with civilians stuck in the areas where there is fighting. Protect them and prevent any harm to them by all possible means.”
He also called on the “good people of Mosul to cooperate with the security forces as much as possible and to facilitate their mission to free them from the rule of the Daesh terrorists”.
Al Sistani, who rarely appears in public, is deeply revered by Iraq’s Shiite majority. His sermon was read by another cleric, Mehdi Karbalaie.
— With inputs from agencies
