Iraqi Forces Retake All Oil Fields in Disputed Areas as Kurds Retreat<br />To the south, the Iraqi military command in Baghdad said Iraqi troops had taken over several disputed<br />areas in Diyala Province held since 2014 by pesh merga forces, who withdrew early Tuesday.<br />In the northern city of Mosul, a commander of Iraqi military units said in a telephone interview on Tuesday<br />that the Iraqi government was negotiating with Kurdish leaders on a Kurdish withdrawal from disputed areas around Mosul near the Kurdish autonomous region.<br />Iraqi launched that He played it all wrong.<br />At a news conference in Baghdad on Tuesday, Mr. Abadi said the referendum "is finished<br />and has become a thing of the past." Mr. Barzani and other supporters of the referendum "took a very bad situation and made it worse," said Denise Natali, a Middle East specialist at the National Defense University in Baghdad.<br />A senior commander of Kurdish forces defending oil fields outside the city of Dibis, about 30 miles northwest of Kirkuk, said in a telephone interview<br />that his troops had pulled out late Monday night as Iraqi troops closed in.<br />Elsewhere in Iraq on Tuesday, Iraqi militia fighters allied with government troops took control of disputed areas in<br />and around Sinjar, a northern region populated by Yazidis, a religious minority.<br />In a swift and largely nonviolent operation that came a day after Iraqi forces reclaimed the contested city of Kirkuk from the Kurdish separatists, Baghdad’s troops occupied all oil-producing facilities<br />that the separatists had held for three years, and which had become critical to the Kurdish autonomous region’s economic vitality.
