WAR WITHIN A WAR: With the Islamic State on its last legs in Iraq, the central government in Baghdad wants to restore the pre-ISIS status quo around the oil-rich region of Kirkuk, an area where Kurdish Peshmerga forces pushed ISIS out in 2014 and extended its control to the south. Now the government of Haider al-Abadi wants the territory back, in particular Kurdish-held oil fields. That puts the U.S. squarely in the middle of its two allies in the war against ISIS, which is not over yet. Over the weekend U.S. troops straddling both sides of the battlelines were working to defuse the situation, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday. “The Americans around Kirkuk, in other words – on the Kurdish side and on the Iraqi military side – they’re all working to defuse this to calm it down.”
But this morning the AP quotes a Kurdish commander as saying Iraqi government troops have seized an oil and gas company and other industrial areas south of Kirkuk and the Kurdistan Region Security Council issued a statement claiming to have destroyed at least five U.S.-supplied Humvees following what it called the “unprovoked attack” south of the city. Mattis blamed the tension in part on last month’s referendum in which 93 percent of Kurdish voters expressed a desire for independence from Iraq. “We thought the referendum was an ill-timed political event, and that it could distract from the combined effort against ISIS,” Mattis told reporters traveling with him Friday. “We’re trying to tone everything down. Let’s figure out how we go forward without losing our sight on the enemy, at the same time recognizing that we’ve got to find a way to move forward.”
