Top US commander Admiral Mike Mullen made an unannounced trip to Iraq on Monday, visiting the ethnically divided northern oil city of Kirkuk for the second time in a year.
Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was to meet representatives of the city's divided communities, as well as senior Iraqi army and police commanders.
Iraq's Kurds have long laid claim to Kirkuk, the hub of Iraq's northern oil fields, but their demands for it to be made the capital of their autonomous region in the north have run into persistent opposition from the province's Arab and Turkmen communities.
The Kurds counter that much of the province's Arab population was resettled as part of a deliberate policy by Saddam Hussein's regime to alter its historical Kurdish majority.
The communal tensions prevented the holding of provincial elections in Kirkuk on January 31, when all but the three Kurdish provinces among Iraq's other 17 provinces voted for new councils.
