BAGHDAD — Iraqi forces completed an operation to take control of all oil fields operated by state-owned North Oil Company in the Kirkuk region on Tuesday, a senior military officer said.

Iraqi forces took control of the Bai Hasan and Avana oil fields northwest of Kirkuk on Tuesday, after seizing the Baba Gurgur, Jambur and Khabbaz fields on Monday, he said.

Oil officials in Baghdad said all the fields were operating normally.

The fields were previously held by Kurdish security forces known as peshmerga, but they pulled out of the area in the face of an advance by forces of the Iraqi central government.

Tuesday's deployment of Iraqi government forces in Dibis, where Bai Hasan and Avana are located, is part of an operation ordered by Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi to take control of Kurdish-held areas outside the three provinces that form Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.

The Kurds withdrew without a fight after federal government troops and militia seized the provincial governor's office and key military bases and oil fields as tensions boiled over following a Kurdish vote for independence last month.

Kurdish technicians had halted operations at the two fields and left the wells on Monday, an oil ministry official in Baghdad said.

The fields accounted for around 250,000 barrels per day of the 650,000 bpd that the autonomous Kurdish region exported under its own auspices, outside the purview of Baghdad, and their loss is a major blow to its revenues.

The regional government took over the two fields in 2014 when federal troops withdrew in the face of the jihadists' lightning advance through areas north and west of Baghdad.

The autonomous Kurdish region is already going through its worst economic crisis after Baghdad severed its air links to the outside world and neighboring Iran closed its border to trade in oil products.

Kirkuk lies outside the autonomous region but forms part of a swathe of historically Kurdish-majority territory that the Kurds want to incorporate in it against the wishes of Baghdad.

Kurdish peshmerga forces also pulled out from the area of Khanaqin, on the border with Iran as Iraqi forces prepared to take over their positions, security sources said.

The region is home to a large Kurdish community and the site of a small oil field, Khana.

Iraq forces take Yazidi town of Sinjar from Kurds

Iraqi forces said Tuesday that they had taken the Yazidi Kurdish town of Sinjar from Kurdish peshmerga forces as they pressed a campaign against Kurdish-held areas outside the autonomous region.

"The Iraqi army and Popular Mobilization Forces entered the town of Sinjar after the peshmerga withdrew without a fight," said the Hashed Al-Shaabi, a paramilitary force made up largely of Iran-trained Shiite militias.

The northwestern town is infamous as the site of one of the Daesh group's worst atrocities, when it killed thousands of Yazidi men and abducted thousands of women and girls as sex slaves in 2014.

Tens of thousands of civilians fled into the nearby mountains in appalling conditions, helping to trigger US intervention against the militants.

The Yazidis are Kurdish-speaking but follow their own non-Muslim faith.

Following the exodus of 2014, many Yazidis volunteered to fight against IS, either in their own militias or those sponsored by the Kurds or by the government.

The Hashed said that Yazidi fighters in its ranks had deployed in Sinjar.

The town was taken from IS by Kurdish forces in 2015.

Sinjar and Kirkuk form part of a swathe of historically Kurdish-majority territory that the Kurds want to incorporate in their autonomous region in the north against the wishes of Baghdad.

Several of them were taken over by the Kurds in 2014 when many units of the Iraqi army disintegrated in the face of the jihadists' lightning advance through areas north and west of Baghdad. — Agencies