Explosion in Kirkuk kills six

A car bomb blast ripped through a Shiite mosque Thursday in the Kurdish-controlled Iraqi city of Kirkuk where people displaced by attacks on nearby towns had found refuge, police and medics said.

Among the victims of the blast, which killed at least six people and wounded 37, were women and children who had been forced from their homes in Amerli, Bashir and Taza, Dr Mohammed Abdallah from Kirkuk hospital said.

Earlier on Thursday, Islamic State militants took over the country's largest Christian town Qaraqosh and surrounding areas, sending tens of thousands of panicked residents fleeing towards autonomous Kurdistan, officials and witnesses said.

The IS militants moved in overnight after the withdrawal of Kurdish peshmerga troops, who are stretched thin across several fronts in Iraq, residents said.

"I now know that the towns of Qaraqosh, Tal Kayf, Bartella and Karamlesh have been emptied of their original population and are now under the control of the militants," Joseph Thomas, the Chaldean archbishop of Kirkuk and Sulaimaniyah, told AFP.

"It's a catastrophe, a tragic situation. We call on the UN Security Council to immediately intervene. Tens of thousands of terrified people are being displaced as we speak, it cannot be described," the archbishop said.