[ noun ] a city in northeastern Iraq; the center of a rich oilfield with pipelines to the Mediterranean <noun.location>
More than half of Iraq's oil exports are pumped through the pipeline from the Kirkuk oil fields to the Mediterranean coast.
It said Iranian artillery shelled the nearby provincial capital of Sulaimaniyeh, including a power station, as fighting continued in the region 75 miles east of Iraq's big Kirkuk oilfields.
Iran launched a missile attack today on Kirkuk, Iraq's northern oil capital, and said 75 people have been killed and more than 100 wounded in new Iraqi chemical bomb attacks on Kurdish villages.
The strategic area lies east of the Kirkuk oilfiends, which produce about 1.5 million barrels of oil a day, more than half of Iraq's current daily output.
By midmorning the battle was still raging at a village about three miles west of Kirkuk.
"Tell the world how happy we are now," says Salah Ali Faisal, an accountant from Kirkuk.
Mr. Talabani said that the status of Kirkuk will be discussed later, and it isn't clear what understandings have been reached on the issue of security.
Indeed, the proposed 540-mile, $1 billion pipeline from the Kirkuk oil fields to the Red Sea never got beyond Bechtel Group's blueprints.
Fighting has recently intensified in the Kurdistan mountains for control of a strategic area east of the Kirkuk oil fields, which produces more than half the oil that finances Iraq's war effort.
Kirkuk, south of Irbil, was the litmus for the Kurdish uprising.