Confusion surrounds the status of Iraq’s largest oil refinery, with witnesses reporting militants have hung their black banners at the site, while senior security officials claim the government still holds it.
An Iraqi who drove past the refinery today said the militants were manning checkpoints around the Beiji facility, 155 miles north of Baghdad, and that a huge fire was raging in one of its tankers.
The security official in Baghdad said the government force protecting the refinery was still inside.
Troops are trying to blunt a week-long offensive by Sunni militants who diplomats fear might have also seized 100 foreign workers.
Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki earlier reached out to Iraq’s disaffected Sunnis and Kurds in a TV diplomatic offensive, hours after foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari said his country had formally asked the US to launch air strikes against militant positions.
The US has been pressing al-Maliki to adopt political inclusion and undermine the uprising by making overtures to Iraq’s once-dominant Sunni minority, which has long complained of discrimination by his government and abuses by his Shiite-led security forces.
In Washington, president Barack Obama briefed leaders of Congress on options for quelling the al Qaida-inspired insurgency, though White House officials said the president had made no decisions about how to respond to the crumbling security situation.
While Obama has not fully ruled out the possibility of air strikes, such action is not imminent, officials said, in part because intelligence agencies have been unable to identify clear targets on the ground.
General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the US had received a request for air power to stop the militants, but highlighted the uncertain political situation in Iraq.
“The entire enterprise is at risk as long as this political situation is in flux,” he told a Senate panel. He added that some Iraqi security forces had backed down when confronted by the militants because they had “simply lost faith” in the central government in Baghdad.
Al-Maliki’s conciliatory words were coupled with a vow to teach the Sunni militants a “lesson” as almost all Iraq’s main communities have been drawn into a spasm of violence not seen since the days of sectarian killings nearly a decade ago.
Al-Maliki, a Shi-ite has rejected claims of bias against Iraq’s Sunnis and Kurds and has in recent days been stressing that the threat posed by the militant Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) will affect all Iraqis regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliations.
He also rejects any suggestion that Isis and other extremist groups enjoy support by disaffected Sunnis fed up with his perceived discrimination.
In a move apparently designed to satisfy Obama’s demand for national reconciliation, al-Maliki expressed optimism in the televised address over what he called the rise by all of Iraq’s political groups to the challenge of defending the nation against the militant threat.
The crisis had led Iraqis to rediscover “national unity”, he said.
“I tell all the brothers there have been negative practices by members of the military, civilians and militiamen, but that is not what we should be discussing. Our effort should not be focused here and leave the larger objective of defeating Isis.”
The Beiji refinery accounts for more than a quarter of the country’s refining capacity – all of which goes towards domestic consumption for things like petrol, cooking oil and fuel for power stations. Any lengthy outage at Beiji risks long queues at the pumps and electricity shortages, adding to the chaos already facing Iraq.