Special forces attempting to cut off Kirkuk, say Kurds

Kurish military commanders say US special forces are seeking to cut off the northern Iraqi cities of Kirkuk and Mosul from the south, but they could not confirm that Americans had seized the Kirkuk oilfields.

"They are using small groups of special forces to cut off the cities," said General Nasrudin Mustafa, the commander of Kurdish forces just north of Kirkuk. But he could not substantiate a BBC report quoting intelligence sources saying the special forces had captured Kirkuk oilfields, the greatest prize in northern Iraq.

In the village of Dollabakra, the Kurdish outpost 25 miles north of the oilfields, soldiers said they had heard no sounds of bombing or fighting overnight. A villager from close to Kirkuk, who had crossed the lines, said all was quiet around the city and he had heard no sound of planes or helicopters.

General Mustafa said that he did not expect the Iraqi army in Kirkuk to put up much resistance, but they were frightened to surrender.

He said: "They tell us that they will surrender if there is any kind of a fight, but they will not give up now because they fear there would be retaliation against their families."

The Iraqi army has taken other measures to prevent its soldiers defecting or going home. At Berdarasha north of Mosul, Ibrahim Ahmed, a local political leader, said: "We know that the Iraqi army confiscated radios and civilian clothes from their men last week." Kurdish radio stations yesterday started broadcasting in Arabic instructions on how Iraqi soldiers should surrender.

Unlike Kirkuk, Mosul, the largely Arab capital of northern Iraq, has been bombed. General Mustafa said: "The US has forces close to Mosul but they are there secretly." He added that the war in the north was turning out very differently from how the Kurds had expected a month ago when they had thought Turkey would allow an American land army to cross into northern Iraq and capture Mosul.

Just east of Mosul in the village of Ganilan, shepherds had heard the bombardment of Mosul in the distance. "We heard the sound of bombing from the Mosul direction," said Amin Hussein, who, with the other villagers, had been expelled from his lands as part of the Iraqi government's policy of ethnic cleansing as long ago as 1974. "We will get the lands we lost back with the help of God and America," said Mr Hussein. He supposed that the Arabs who had taken his home would go back to where they came from.

Other villagers recalled how much their little community had suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein, naming those who had been killed, such as Abdul Hadi Mustafa, who had been dragged behind a car until he died.

The northern front of the offensive against President Saddam has been slow to develop because of the unexpected refusal of Turkey to support the American and British invasion. Because of that, intelligence reports that the Kirkuk oilfields had been captured could be an attempt to keep the Iraqi high command focused on the north of the country.

The Iraqi army is expected to fight for Baghdad and Tikrit, but had probably written off Basra and the far south from an early stage. Basra is too close to Kuwait and too far from Baghdad to defend. It is also an overwhelmingly Shia Muslim city with little sympathy for President Saddam.

The Iraqi leader's strategy, according to one veteran Iraqi observer, is "to draw the war out, to make it last for 20 days or more".

President Saddam can do that best by forcing the Allies to fight in the cities where they cannot use their airpower and the Iraqi army knows the terrain better than they do.