Iraqi forces say they have now wrested control of all areas of Kirkuk province from Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, following fierce fighting.
They say they have retaken Alton Kupri, the last Kurdish-held area. There has been no Kurdish confirmation.
A BBC correspondent at the scene witnessed rocket, artillery and machine-gun fire.
Iraqi forces have this week taken over swathes of territory held by the Kurds since 2014.
Army and allied militia launched an operation which saw Kurdish forces pushed back into the officially recognised autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).
The oil-rich province of Kirkuk, which includes ethnically mixed Kirkuk city, is claimed by both the central government in Baghdad and the KRI. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered military action after the Kurdish government held a referendum which overwhelmingly backed independence. Mr Abadi had declared the vote illegitimate.
An Iraqi military spokesman said counter-terrorism and federal police forces, as well as Iranian-backed militia, had advanced on Alton Kupri at 07:30 (04:30 GMT).
AFP
The BBC's Richard Galpin, who was at a checkpoint in the area, says there was a "major outbreak of fighting" with large numbers of military vehicles and soldiers heading to the scene.
The town, known as Perde in Kurdish, lies on the northern edge of Kirkuk province, about 50km (30 miles) south of the Kurdish capital, Irbil.
AFP
The latest action comes a day after an Iraqi court ordered the arrest of Kurdistan's vice-president for calling troops sent to Kirkuk this week "occupying forces".
Peshmerga forces had controlled much of the province since 2014, when Islamic State militants swept across northern Iraq and the army collapsed. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41693143
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A Minneapolis-headquartered news group on 10-18-17 published this:
“The Iraqi army can’t be trusted, and they’ll come for us after they’re done with ISIS,” ordinary Kurds feared. Now that bitter prediction has come true after the Iraqis took over Kirkuk on Monday. They threw away the flag of Kurdistan and any sign of Kurdish sacrifice for that city’s stability and peace.
One may ask why the Kurds helped the Iraqi army against ISIS. The answer is the US told them to. American leaders made a deal between the Kurds and the Iraqis for a joint operation against ISIS. The Obama administration was so desperate for victory against ISIS that they sped up the offensive and made all kinds of promises to the Kurds, such as the Kurds getting to keep areas they occupied, as long as they led the offensive against ISIS and let Iraqi troops pass through Kurdish-controlled territories.
But now, the US is nowhere to be seen when Iraqi soldiers march on Kurds. The US spent billions of dollars on the Iraqi army for the fight against ISIS and terrorist groups, in general, in addition to supplying it with all kinds of armored vehicles, tanks and machine guns. Unfortunately, that equipment is now being used against the Kurds. How could American leaders, Republicans or Democrats, explain to their people the posters of Shiite clerics and sectarian banners on American-supplied Humvees and tanks used in the domestic war in Iraq? That’s what is happening in Iraq today. Abrams tanks and Humvees are adorned with sectarian flags and used to terrorize entire civilian populations.
When the Iraqi army and militia marched into Kirkuk on Monday, millions of Kurds in Kurdistan and around the world spent a sleepless 24 hours. All the US did was release a statement saying the White House was concerned and was monitoring the situation. That’s just about the most useless thing a country like the United States could say. People’s lives hang in the balance. Monitoring the situation doesn’t do anyone any good. President Donald Trump said the US was not taking sides. No one has asked him to take sides. Kurds and Sunnis alike say the US should play a mediating role, and tell the Iraqis not to use their weapons on the Kurds and/or to further expand their operations. That is the least the US could do. https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-10-18/kurds-wonder-if-they-shouldve-helped-iraqs-army-mosul
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sundown
Shasta
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But our search for who we are, where we came from and where we are going takes us into the distant past, beyond the reckoning of historians--back to the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, back to the time when people from other worlds arrived on earth in spacecraft.
The records and artifacts of ancient Sumer, Egypt, India and even the Incan civilization bear witness to these visitors from distant planets. They arrived here with superior technology some 500,000 years ago. The aliens were not benevolent, and they manipulated the evolutions of Earth. They practiced genetic engineering and taught men the arts of war.
They were followed here by people from Maldek, a planet that at one time was in our solar system but was destroyed by warring factions. All that remains of Maldek is the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. When the Maldekians began to incarnate on earth, they too brought an advanced science and a warlike nature.
The Mahabharata, an ancient Hindu text, talks about great battles, flying war chariots and advanced weapons of mass destruction. It all sounds like something out of George Lucas’s Star Wars. But it is a vision of the past, not the future.
Earth has become a crossroads in the galaxy. She has many different evolutions--people who have their origins here, others who started out on other systems of worlds. Some are of the light; some have committed themselves to darkness. Some are men, some are fallen angels who have taken embodiment, and some are angels of light. It is a complex tapestry….we remember when, under the influence of the fallen angels, we betrayed our mentors.
This betrayal and the abuse of technology led to the sinking of Lemuria over 12,000 years ago. All that remains of that continent is the ring of fire,which traces the boundaries of the Pacific Ocean along the west coast of the Americas and the east coast of Asia. About a thousand years later Atlantis sank. The once great continents of Lemuria and Atlantis now lie beneath the oceans, their triumphs and their failures covered by the shifting sands of time.
Since then the ages have rolled like cars on a great Ferris wheel. Civilizations have risen, flowered, declined and disappeared. And the people of Lemuria and Atlantis have reincarnated again and again, making good and bad karma along the way. And today many have gravitated to the Americas….
Chananda, Chief of the Indian Council of the Great White Brotherhood, stated on 2-9-1962: “The Aquarian age is intended to be an age of absolute cooperation between God and the ascended masters, the ascended masters and man, and between people everywhere. The symbol of Aquarius--a water bearer with balanced urns--reveals harmonious service and bountiful supply. This rhythmic spirit of cooperation must be the basis of every relationship, replacing outworn selfishness.”
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Man lacks nothing, for God saw to it that the power of His love and grace infused each individualized spirit-spark with those radiant virtues which are very much a part of Himself. He made all things by Christ--by the Word which conveyed life to the uttermost depths of the void. The Christ then was first the universal manifestation of the Father-Mother God and then the individualization of that manifestation. Begotten of God, a Spirit, he also is Spirit cast in His Image. Thus each individualization of the Christ, each fragment of the Universal One in physical embodiment is a spirit, hence a joint heir with Christ, having within himself the potential of imitating in all of his thoughts and feelings and actions the original creation of the Father….He must replace the treacherous spirit of competition, which seized the heart of Cain and still dominates the mass consciousness, with the all-pervading sense of abundant love….
It is up to man then at the great harvest of the seeds he has sown—at the great return of the matrices he has sent forth--to separate the sheep from the goats, the light from the darkness, the pure from the impure patterns he has created, and then to lift into the heaven world, into his own causal body where the gentle things of love abide, those permanent graces which he has out pictured and which the Creator desires to make a real part of his consciousness.
Man must develop the heavenly consciousness in order to establish within himself a lodestone of infinite love that will draw to him the fullness of the Godhead bodily that it might dwell in him and that he might escape the errors of the past through the universal magnitude of the Cosmic Christ.
(by Ruth Hawkins)
-Paul the Venetian: Pearls of Wisdom 15:7
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-Columbus
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