After a night of ceaseless looting, Rizgarali Hamgam, installed as provisional governor by the Kurds following the seizure of Kirkuk Thursday, admitted, "We cannot control the situation."

His office was besieged by hundreds of complainants as bands of looters who followed the peshmerga fighters into Kirkuk Thursday made off with lorry loads of booty.

In a supreme irony, hardly a drop of petrol could be found in the centre of one of Iraq's main oil-producing regions, and witnesses described fights over the last few litres drained from tankers.

Hamgam said a number of people had been killed or wounded in personal or ethnic score-settling, but gave no details, and one of the city's main hospitals said it had admitted no such cases.

Historically a Kurdish-majority city, Kirkuk was "ethnically cleansed" under the rule of Saddam Hussein, who expelled many of its original inhabitants and replaced them by Arabs.

With Kirkuk's fall, thousands of Kurdish exiles flooded back in, vowing to reclaim their confiscated property, by force if necessary.

But no witnesses could be found to support the governor's statements, and many of the complainants thronging his office were themselves Kurds.

The Saddam Hussein hospital said the only deaths reported were four Iraqi soldiers and two Kurds killed in fighting and three people accidentally shot in celebratory firing.

Hamgam said he was waiting for more US forces to arrive to help make the city safe. A few US special troops accompanied the peshmergas into Kirkuk but the swift Kurdish move into the city appeared to have caught Washington by surprise.

A furious Turkey said Thursday it had won a pledge from the United States to drive out the Kurdish fighters from Kirkuk, which also has a strong Turkmen population, as the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) said its forces were going on Friday anyway.

General "Mam" Rostam, a PUK commander, told AFP early Friday that some 10,000 peshmergas in the city have now been ordered to leave.

"The order has been given. We are waiting now for the US forces to arrive. The armed peshmergas should leave the city today or tomorrow," said .

However, Rostam said a small number of the fighters would stay in the city to help the US forces secure it.

Ankara, which fears a Kurdish independence movement in Iraq that could embolden Kurdish separatists in Turkey, had threatened to send its forces into the north if the Kurds took control of Kirkuk and Mosul.

US officials said Thursday the peshmergas entered Kirkuk after a popular uprising broke out, but witnesses here said they were already there beforehand.

Rostam said that after their entry into Kirkuk, stealing a symbolic march on the rival Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the PUK fighters had ended their operations against Iraqi forces.

KDP peshmergas for their part entered Mosul, the other main city in northern Iraq, on Friday.

Rostam said a plan would be prepared with US officers and representatives of local Kurd, Arab, Turkmen and Assyrian populations for governing Kirkuk.

He said his forces would remain around Kirkuk if necessary but that most planned to return to their homes.

SPACE.WIRE