15 missing as IS seizes Iraq oil facility

KIRKUK: Islamic State insurgents on Saturday seized a small crude oil station near the northern Iraqi city Kirkuk where 15 employees were working, and explosions in and around the capital Baghdad killed at least nine people.
Two officials from the state-run North Oil Co. confirmed the militants seized a crude oil separation unit in Khabbaz and said 15 oil workers were missing after the company lost contact with them.
“We received a call from one of the workers saying dozens of Daesh fighters were surrounding the facility and asking workers to leave the premises. We lost contact and now the workers might be taken hostage,” an engineer from the North Oil Co. told Reuters, using a derogatory acronym for Islamic State.
The radical movement seized at least four small oilfields when it overran large areas of northern Iraq last summer, and began selling crude oil and gasoline to finance their operations.
Islamic State insurgents attacked regional Kurdish forces southwest of Kirkuk on Friday, seizing some areas including parts of the Khabbaz oilfields.
Kurdish peshmerga forces sought to push back Islamic State in further fighting near Khabbaz on Saturday, Kurdish military sources said.
Khabbaz is a small oilfield 20 southwest of Kirkuk with a maximum production capacity of 15,000 barrels per day. It was producing around 10,000 bpd before the attack.
Further south in Baghdad, two bombs in a central neighborhood and a farming district south of the capital killed at least seven civilians on Saturday, medics and police said.
Meanwhile, Kurdish forces engaged in sporadic battles with Islamic State around the Syrian town of Kobani on Saturday, seeking to expand their control in the area, a monitor said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Kurdish fighters had seized a village on Saturday as they battle to expel IS from the region.
YPG fighters now control 17 of the hundreds of villages, some no more than a few houses, in the Kobani area.
In a statement released late Friday, the Kurds managed to “liberate several regions” in the west of Kobani.
They said they also seized several military vehicles and captured a car bomb and weapons and ammunition from IS forces.
In a video posted on the Internet, IS-linked media said the militants had withdrawn from Kobani because of the air strikes but vowed to return, the SITE monitoring group reported.
Some 200,000 people fled into Turkey from the Kobani region because of the fighting, with most unable to return for now because of the destruction caused during the violence.