Iraqi soldiers, ISIS militants clash at country's largest oil refinery

On Saturday, Iraqi forces surrounded and entered the country's biggest oil refinery. Government troops have held the refinery for months, but this week ISIS militants briefly took over a small part of the complex.

Iraqi soldiers surrounded and entered the country's biggest oil refinery Saturday, which has been besieged for days by Islamic State militants, a senior official said.

The refinery at Beiji, some 155 miles north of Baghdad, has been held by the Iraqi military for months despite the militants' onslaught. Holding it remains crucial for the country, as it accounts for a little more than a quarter of the country's entire refining capacity.

Abdel-Wahab al-Saadi, the top military commander in Iraq's Salahuddin province, said ground forces entered the refinery Saturday, days after a number of Islamic State militants carried out a large-scale attack and briefly took over a small part of the sprawling complex.

"It is another victory achieved by Iraqi security forces that are growing confident in the war against the terrorists," al-Saadi told The Associated Press.

A day earlier, Iraqi soldiers, backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and Shiite and Sunni, gained control of the towns of al-Malha and al-Mazraah, located 1.9 miles south of the refinery.

On Saturday, Kurdish peshmerga forces recaptured two villages just south of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk that lie near the highway linking it to Baghdad, said Rasould Omar, a senior official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Meanwhile, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement late Friday that two of the dead in the bombing near the U.S. Consulate in Irbil are believed to be Turks. The bombing killed three people. U.S. officials said there were no American casualties.

In separate violence Saturday, police said a bombing on a commercial street killed three persons and wounded 10 in central Baghdad. A roadside bomb missed a police patrol in the capital's western suburbs, killing one civilian and wounding three, officers said.

Police said a sticky bomb attached to a minibus also exploded in Baghdad's southeastern district of New Baghdad, killing three passengers and wounding seven.

Medical officials confirmed the casualties. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to journalists.

Associated Press writer Imad Matti in Kirkuk, Iraq, contributed to this report.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Iraqi soldiers, ISIS militants clash at country's largest oil refinery
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2015/0418/Iraqi-soldiers-ISIS-militants-clash-at-country-s-largest-oil-refinery
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe