Reuters, Iraq :Iraqi government forces battled Sunni rebels for control of the country’s biggest refinery on Thursday as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki waited for a US response to an appeal for air strikes to beat back the threat to Baghdad.The sprawling Baiji refinery, 200 km (130 miles) north of the capital near Tikrit, was a battlefield as troops loyal to the Shi’ite-led government held off insurgents from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and its allies who had stormed the perimeter a day earlier, threatening national energy supplies.A government spokesman said around noon (0900 GMT) that its forces were in “complete control” but a witness in Baiji said fighting was continuing and ISIL militants were still present.A day after the government publicly appealed for US air power, there were indications Washington is sceptical of whether that would be effective, given the risk of civilian deaths that could further enrage Iraq’s once dominant Sunni minority.Regional US allies seemed keen to discourage air strikes.Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a NATO ally, said the United States “does not view such attacks positively”, given the risk to civilians – a view some US officials have also expressed. A Saudi source said that Western powers agreed with Riyadh, the main Sunni power in the region, that what was needed was political change, not outside intervention, to heal sectarian division that has widened under Maliki.Video aired by Al-Arabiya television showed smoke billowing from the plant and the black flag used by ISIL flying from a building. Workers who had been inside the complex, which spreads for miles close to the Tigris river, said Sunni militants seemed to hold most of the compound in early morning and that security forces were concentrated around the refinery’s control room.The 250-300 remaining staff were evacuated early on Thursday, one of those workers said by telephone. Military helicopters had attacked militant positions overnight, he added.Baiji, 40 km (25 miles) north of Saddam Hussein’s home city of Tikrit, lies squarely in territory captured in the past week by an array of armed Sunni groups, spearheaded by ISIL, which is seeking a new Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria. On Tuesday, staff shut down the plant, which makes much of the fuel Iraqis in the north need for both transport and generating electricity.ISIL, which considers Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim majority as heretics in league with neighbouring, Shi’ite Iran, has led a Sunni charge across northern Iraq after capturing the major city of Mosul last week as Maliki’s US-armed forces collapsed.The group’s advance has only been slowed by a regrouped military, Shi’ite militias and other volunteers. But on Tuesday, Sunni fighters took the small town of Mutasim, south of Samarra, giving them the prospect of encircling the city which houses a major Shi’ite shrine. A local police source said security forces withdrew without a fight when dozens of vehicles carrying insurgents converged on Mutasim from three directions.ISIL, whose leader broke with al Qaeda after accusing the global jihadist movement of being too cautious, has now secured cities and territory in Iraq and Syria, in effect putting it well on the path to establishing its own well-armed enclave that Western countries fear could become a centre for terrorism.The Iraqi government made public on Wednesday its request for US air strikes, two and half years after US forces ended the nine-year occupation that began by toppling Saddam in 2003.Washington has given no indication it will agree to attack and some politicians have urged President Barack Obama to insist that Maliki goes as a condition for further US help.
