On Sunday, the US-led coalition officially handed over the K1 Air Base in northern Iraq's Kirkuk province to the Iraqi Army in a pre-planned move that they said was unrelated to recent attacks by Shiite militias against Iraqi bases hosting foreign troops.
The US-led international coalition's headquarters in the northern Iraqi province of Nineveh near the Syrian border has been transferred to Iraq's army, the country's Baghdad Al Youm news outlet reports.
According to Baghdad Al Youm, the coalition forces transferred the Nineveh headquarters on Monday as part of the process of withdrawing foreign troops from some Iraqi provinces.
At the same time, the news outlet says, the US forces are rapidly completing the construction of a base near the city of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, which may become one of the largest military bases in the Middle East.
The Monday handover came after Brig. Gen. Vincent Barker, the sustainment director of the combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), said late last week that the coalition had transferred the K1 Air Base in the northern province of Kirkuk to the Iraqi Armed Forces.
Barker described the base as a “critical location for the coalition, the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] and Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service in the fight to find and destroy ISIS [Daesh*] safe havens in the rugged Hamrin Mountains”.
“It will continue to be a key…
