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In a sign of a split in the coalition of Sunni Muslim forces supporting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the militants clashed with an Iraqi Baathist faction allied with them, Iraqi security officials said on Saturday.
The clashes took place in western Kirkuk and the suburb of Hawija, a longtime stronghold of the Men of the Army of Naqshbandia, a group formed by former army officers who served under Saddam Hussein and joined with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, in its drive through Iraq.
A security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with official policy, said militants from the two factions fought one another Friday night after ISIS tried to disarm the Naqshbandia. However, someone in Hawija who witnessed the clash said the two factions had fought over control of gasoline and oil tanker trucks brought by the Sunni militants from the refinery at Baiji, which they have been attacking for nearly a week now.
The security official said eight Naqshbandia militants and nine ISIS militants had been killed.
The Naqshbandia group was formed under the leadership of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of Hussein's few top commanders to escape capture by the American military. The group includes Baathist party members and former military officers, and has a Sufi, nationalist philosophy that is at odds with the ISIS ideology.
The group was active in demonstrations last year in Hawija, one of its strongholds, that ended with at least 42 people killed when the Iraqi Army tried to disperse protesters. Except for Sunni neighbourhoods of western Kirkuk, the city has been under the control of Kurdish pesh merga militiamen, after the Iraqi Army in the area collapsed.
The official Iraqi military spokesman, Gen Qassim Atta, again claimed that Iraqi forces had regained the initiative. He said fighting was continuing in Qaim, an important border crossing with Syria in western Anbar Province that apparently fell under ISIS control on Friday. In a briefing for reporters, General Atta, declined to take questions as he has throughout the past week.
"We will not let them take any foot of our earth," the general said. "We are the ones who are making the attacks." He said the militants had been particularly hard hit by Iraqi airstrikes. "You should see how those ISIS run away when they hear even the sound of our air force," he said. "It shows they are really afraid."
General Atta then played video from a gun camera that showed helicopter gunship bombing runs on groups of men who he said were ISIS fighters and who were running in the streets of Tal Afar, a city west of Mosul in the north. Tal Afar was also reported to have fallen to the insurgents last week, but Iraqi forces were battling to retake it, and local reports said that it was still being contested.
In a separate development, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia called Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq and offered Russia's "full support for the Iraqi government's efforts to liberate Iraqi territory from the terrorists' hands as quickly as possible," according to a statement issued Saturday by the Kremlin.
©2014 The New York Times News Service
