Kurdish fighters took the strategic city of Khaneqin, near the Iranian border Peshmerga fighters advanced on Mosul. Then came news that Kurdish fighters had stormed unopposed into the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, where US B-52 bombers had been pounding a division of Iraqi troops for some time.Chaotic street celebrations took place as the Kurds – this time without their US special forces allies – entered Iraq’s fourth city. Hundreds of cars poured in with Kurdish people waving green flags and the Stars and Stripes. The inevitable statue of President Saddam was sent crashing and the looting began. The Baath party HQ – whose stalwarts had apparently fled to Tikrit – was stripped bare.It was victory replete with political complexity. Kirkuk is surrounded by the richest oilfields in the region and is connected by pipelines to ports on the Mediterranean.

In 2002, it was carrying about one million barrels a day of Iraqi crude to Turkey’s Mediterranean coastal outlet of Ceyhan. Small wonder that leaders in the Kurdish self-rule area in the north of Iraq want to make Kirkuk the political capital of a Kurdish autonomous entity in a federation with the rest of Iraq after the war. And small wonder that neighbouring Turkey, with its own restive Kurdish community, considers the idea a security threat. It fears that autonomy – or worst still, independence – would make its own Kurds want the same.It is a political minefield. The Kurds want to reverse President Saddam’s longstanding “Arabisation programme”, which sought to change the demography of the areas where Iraq’s vast oil wealth lies by forcing Kurds and Turkmen out to be replaced by Arabs, mainly from the south. Turkey, which has amassed vast troop concentrations along the nearby border, has threatened that if the Kurds do not withdraw it will send its own troops in.Within two hours of the capture of Kirkuk the Turkish Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, announced that Ankara was watching events in northern Iraq closely and “whatever is necessary will be done”.

Minutes later Washington announced that American special forces were trying to get a US presence into Kirkuk “in the interest of regional stability”, and the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was on the phone to Ankara to promise that fresh US forces would be in Kirkuk within a few hours The Kurds announced that they wouldn’t be staying in Kirkuk. And the Turks announced they would be sending “military observers” to Kirkuk to monitor the Kurdish withdrawal.It was not the only political row. A US plan to bring together 43 Iraqi politicians – 14 former exiles and 29 internal critics of President Saddam – at a meeting on Saturday at the Ali ibn Abi Talib airbase outside Nasiriyah was announced by the US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher in Washington The aim was to plan an interim government. But behind the scenes there was tension between the Pentagon, which wants to get prominent exiled Iraqis into position as soon as possible, and the State Department, which insists this should be a chance for leaders to arise from the population of liberated Iraqis.At the heart of the disagreement is the controversial Ahmed Chalabi, the candidate of Donald Rumsfeld, but who is distrusted by others in part because of a conviction for embezzlement. Also there will be Ayatollah Mohammad Bakir Hakim, a promiment Shia leader who has been in exile in Iran – and of whom one US hawk reportedly said: “We want to give the Iraqis democracy, but we don’t want them voting for someone like Hakim.”Yet another sign of the problems of the post-Saddam maelstrom to come was evidenced in the holy city of Najaf, where a reign of terror was reported at the hands of a militia group backed by US special forces. It has been looting and terrorising the neighbourhood with impunity, residents say. Yesterday in Najaf a senior Shia cleric – who until two weeks ago lived in London and was an adviser to Tony Blair –was murdered in the city’s main shrine, the Imam Ali mosque.