Kurdish victory provokes fears of Turkish invasion

Kurdish forces seized Kirkuk, the oil capital of northern Iraq, bringing joyful street celebrations yesterday. Kirkuk is the first northern Iraqi city to fall, but its capture by the Kurds could prompt an invasion by the Turkish army.

Turkey rushed military advisers to the city last night to ensure the Kurds pull back and the White House tried to reassure Ankara that American forces would be in firm control.

Kurdish leaders claimed that their fighters advanced on the city to stop an orgy of looting that began after the Iraqi army withdrew several hours earlier.

But the advance appeared to break an agreement with Turkey that Kurdish troops would not capture Kirkuk, which Kurds regard as their natural capital and from where they were expelled by Saddam Hussein.

Kurdish commanders said they would withdraw their forces and hand over the city to the Allies. But they have already appointed their own governor, and it appears clear they intend to remain in administrative control of the city.

There was little sign yesterday that the thousands of soldiers who make up the joint forces of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan were making much effort to stop the widespread looting. Within the space of five minutes I saw Kurds steal a fire engine, an agricultural thresher and an Iraqi Airways bus. Other vehicles drove past piled with mattresses and chairs stolen from abandoned Iraqi offices and military camps.

The Kurdish parties claimed that they had co-ordinated their capture of Kirkuk with the US but there were very few American soldiers in evidence on the streets of the city or in the oilfield to the west. In Washington the Pentagon said US special forces were with the Kurdish fighters as they entered the city.

The first news of the surprise Kurdish attack on Kirkuk came at midday yesterday. They had taken Mahmour, a small town to the west of Kirkuk, overnight after heavy US bombing. When we drove towards Kirkuk, peshmerga (Kurdish soldiers) were at first uncertain that the city had been taken. Villages of Arab settlers, who had replaced Kurds in the region over the past 20 years, were empty apart from a few ducks and stray dogs. Only as we began to enter the oilfields did it became clear that Kirkuk had been captured. "It is finished, the way to Kirkuk is open," said an oncoming driver.

Little grey fortresses, looking like small medieval castles, guard the road through the oilfields but they had been abandoned by the Iraqi army. The road soon became crowded with trucks piled with loot, most of it of little value, such as chairs and filing cabinets. The looters had not even paused to demolish the portraits of Saddam Hussein beside the road.

By the time we reached the centre there were only intermittent bursts of machine-gun fire. The Kurds in the street appeared astonished at the speed with which the Iraqi army had fled and the Kurds had entered the city. "At 8am I went to my work and heard the B-52 aircraft making a bombing strike in top of the mountain," said Ahmed Rasul, standing in a street of shuttered shops. "It was after that that the Baath party and the army escaped, suddenly I saw the peshmerga.''

Refugees long expelled from Kirkuk had already heard the news and returned. Mahmoud Hassan said: "I was for 27 years a teacher in this city and was forced to leave in 1998. One of my brothers is still missing after he was sent to prison in the 1980s."

In an office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), outside which a man was trying to smash a portrait in tiles of Saddam Hussein with his rifle butt, the officials were distributing safe conduct passes to people frightened because of membership of the Baath party or close association with Iraqi authorities. The quiet efficiency with which they were doing so showed that the Kurds had prepared their occupation of Kirkuk very carefully over previous weeks, though Rabar Arif, a PUK official, said: "They only ordered us to go to Kirkuk at 11am to help restore order."

He agreed that the Kurds might be going beyond "the programme agreed between us and the Americans''. But this was the reality of the situation and we should accept it.

He said all ethnic groups would be safe whether they were Kurdish, Turkoman or Arab. He said: "Those who are Arab settlers who came in with the Iraqi authorities have already left. The other Arabs have stayed."

Turkomans, who form a significant minority in Kirkuk, seemed less certain about the future. In the new Kurdish Governor's office, a Turkoman professor of civil engineering, Mahmoud Mahmoud, pointed to a friend and said he had just had his two cars stolen at gunpoint. "We are surprised at what has happened. We didn't expect the Kurds to enter. We thought only that the Americans would come." A harassed- looking American officer, one of the few we saw in the city, said that his commander would speak to him.

The conversation with Prof Mahmoud was overheard by a Kurdish officer who said he wanted to speak to us. This turned out to be Pavel Talabani, the son of the PUK leader Jalal Talabani and the PUK's counter-terrorism expert. He said that looting was wholly under control and explained the sudden Kurdish entry into the city. "We came to control the situation,'' he said. "There will be a US presence here, we're expecting to withdraw some of our men within 45 minutes.''

Outside the Governor's office the thousands of peshmerga milling around showed no signs of leaving. The PUK Governor, Razgar Hamajan, looked a bit perplexed at this pledge to withdraw and said: "I don't have any instructions about a withdrawal."

On the road out of Kirkuk there was a traffic jam of vehicles, many of them loaded with loot trying to make their way back to Arbil and Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdish-controlled part of Iraqi Kurdistan. The peshmerga made ineffective attempts to control the looters. When two of them waved a large yellow bulldozer to the side of the road and stood in front of it the driver simply pressed the accelerator until they jumped aside at the last minute to avoid being crushed under its enormous wheels.