The flashpoint province in north Iraq sits at the centre of a major row between Kurdish regional authorities in Arbil and the central government in Baghdad, with insurgent groups exploiting the fissures to carry out attacks.

US military officials have persistently labelled the dispute as one of the biggest long-term challenges to stability in Iraq.

Violence remains high in the area, with bombings, targeted killings, and even shootouts between Arab Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish security officers occurring in the past month.

"Al-Qaeda is trying to destabilise the situation in Kirkuk, targeting the different ethnic groups, fanning sectarianism," provincial deputy police chief Major General Torhan Yusuf Abdulrahman told AFP.

"Despite their differences, local political leaders all believe that it is necessary to maintain American forces in Kirkuk to help resolve problems."

In a bid to build trust between the two parallel forces -- Iraq's army and Kurdish regional forces known as peshmerga -- US forces have since January 2010 taken part in what is called the combined security force.

The project involves 1,200 American troops manning joint checkpoints and taking part in joint patrols with soldiers from both sides at key locations in four provinces in north Iraq, including 300 soldiers for Kirkuk alone, according to Colonel Barry Johnson, a US military spokesman.

But with all 45,000 American troops in Iraq due to withdraw from the country at the end of the year under the terms of a bilateral security pact, one senior Iraqi security official has labelled the pullout a "grave threat" for Kirkuk.

"The Americans are a source of confidence," said the official in Kirkuk, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Everyone looks to them to resolve problems related to the security forces, and political conflicts."

Any continued presence of US forces in Iraq beyond 2011, however, would require a request to be made by Baghdad to Washington, Johnson noted.

No such request has yet been submitted, despite several senior US civilian and military leaders having visited Iraq last month to press Baghdad to decide, and no major Iraqi leader has yet publicly voiced support for a longer-term American presence.

The dispute between Baghdad and Arbil has its roots in ex-dictator Saddam Hussein's arabisation policy of the early 1990s, which forced around 120,000 Kurds out of Kirkuk and into Iraqi Kurdistan's three-province region, according to New York-based Human Rights Watch.

That was partly reversed following Saddam's ouster in the 2003 US-led invasion, when peshmerga forces progressed south and east, claiming Kirkuk and parts of the northern and central provinces of Nineveh, Diyala and Salaheddin.

Since then, the two camps have accused each other of seeking to change the demographic balance in the provinces in order to secure their oil wealth, with the tensions occasionally spilling over.

On April 25, for example, two Kurdish security officers died and four people were wounded in clashes between Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish forces in the province's eponymous capital.

Senior security leaders quickly insisted in the aftermath of the shootings, though, that they were accidental and did not equate to a conflict between Arab Iraqi forces and their Kurdish counterparts.

Attacks also remain common in the province, despite violence levels having fallen from their peak in 2006 and 2007, with two guards of a local police chief having been killed in a bomb attack on Thursday.

The situation remains "fragile," according to provincial council chief Hassan Toran, a Turkman who says the size of the provincial police force is insufficient to help secure the area.

While Kirkuk is one of the few provinces in Iraq where the police rather than the army take primary responsibility for security, its 11,300-strong force has a shortfall of at least 3,500, according to a security official.

In that context, the withdrawal of US forces is a "great challenge," according to Kirkuk's Chaldean bishop Louis Sako.

"It will leave a vacuum that we need to fill with harmony and reconciliation," he said.

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