Turkey said tonight it had won a pledge from the United States to drive out Kurdish fighters who captured the strategic oil-rich city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq.
Turkey is suspicious the Iraqi Kurds might use the capture of the city, and the wealth from its surrounding oilfields, to kickstart a move towards independence. Turkey fears such a move could rekindle a separatist Kurdish rebellion in adjoining southeast Turkey.
Shortly after Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul announced that Washington had promised to remove the Kurdish militia from Kirkuk, an Iraqi Kurdish official said their forces would leave the town tomorrow.
US-backed Kurdish forces took possession of the centre of Kirkuk this morning without a fight.It was unclear how far the Kurdish move into Kirkuk had been coordinated with US forces, under whose authority the Kurds have said they operate.
Senior Kurdish commander Mam Rostam said that "peshmerga" fighters, who engaged Iraqi forces in light fighting for around five hours before the city fell, moved on the city when they heard an uprising had begun.
"We were on top of the hill and we heard there was an uprising, so we just entered the city," said Rostam, of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). But he and other Kurdish officials could not confirm an explicit US order to move.
Residents of Kirkuk, a city of 700,000 people that for the past 12 years has been under Baghdad's control but is close to a Kurdish-ruled zone of northern Iraq, gave an ecstatic welcome to hundreds of Kurdish fighters pouring in from the east.
There was no sign of resistance and residents said Iraqi soldiers had either laid down their arms or withdrawn south towards Tikrit.
The city was pounded by US B-52 bombers in the morning, helping to trigger the Iraqi collapse, which came the day after US forces took control of most of Baghdad. US bombers had been pummelling Iraqi defensive lines near Kirkuk and elsewhere along the demarcation line with the Kurdish-run area since the Iraq war began on March 20th. But only in the last few days had Iraqi troops begun pulling back.
The Kurds also captured the town of Khanaqin. To the northwest of Kirkuk, US Abrams tanks rolled towards Iraq's third city of Mosul, making their debut on the northern war front.
There are few US forces in northern Iraq after Turkey refused to let its territory be used to open a second front.
Until now, Kirkuk has been in an Iraqi government-controlled area just to the west and south of a Kurdish-ruled zone created under Western protection after the Gulf War of 1991. The PUK is one of the two main Kurdish organisations in northern Iraq, dividing control of the zone with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).