Militants Seize Second-Biggest City in Iraq

Iraqi army soldiers abandoned their weapons and fled the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Tuesday, as Sunni militants freed hundreds of prisoners and seized military bases, police stations, banks and the provincial governor’s headquarters. The insurgent attacks were among the most audacious assaults on the Iraqi government since the American military withdrawal more than two years ago.

The rout in Mosul, the second-largest Iraqi city after Baghdad and an important center of the country’s petroleum industry, was breathtaking in its speed, and appeared to take government officials by surprise, not to mention residents of the city itself. A major humiliation for the government forces in Iraq’s Sunni-dominated areas, the defeat also reflected the stamina of a broader Sunni insurgency that has been growing in neighboring Syria.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki ordered a state of emergency for the entire country. His Shiite-led government has been increasingly struggling to deal with the resurrection of Sunni militancy in Iraq since the American military departure at the end of 2011.

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By midday on Tuesday, militants believed to belong to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, one of the strongest extremist groups, were in control of much of central and southern Mosul, according to witnesses. Local officials claimed that many of the fighters were jihadists who had swept in from the porous border with Syria.

As hundreds of families fled Mosul, the bodies of slain soldiers, police officers and civilians were seen lying in streets. “They took control of everything, and they are everywhere,” said one soldier who fled the city, and gave only his first name, Haidar.

The Mosul assault came in a week when Mr. Maliki’s government has been trying to beat back a surging militant offensive concentrated in central and northern Iraq and carried out by hundreds of well-armed fighters roaming the country in pickup trucks, seemingly able to strike at will.

In Mosul, along with the cities of Samarra and Ramadi, the militants have stormed police stations, government offices and even a university. On Saturday, car bombs killed scores of people across the capital, Baghdad, in one of the deadliest coordinated attacks in weeks.

Security officials have framed the attacks as an attempt by militants to distract the army from its ongoing battle in the western province of Anbar, where militants have managed to hold territory, including the city of Falluja and parts of neighboring Ramadi, for six months. With the fighting on Tuesday, the government faced the possibility of losing another major Iraqi city to extremists whose stated goals include establishing an Islamic state.

And with its soldiers on the run, the government appeared to face a deep challenge in regaining control of Mosul, a stronghold for extremist groups linked to Al Qaeda and a hub of financing for militants, who ran extortion and kidnapping rings to finance their operations in Iraq and Syria.

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TURKEY

Mosul

SYRIA

Sulaimaniya

Tikrit

IRAN

Baghdad

IRAQ

Tigris

KUWAIT

SAUDI ARABIA

The New York Times

“The reach of armed Sunni extremist groups beyond the restive province of Anbar reinforces our view that the Islamist insurgency will create significant challenges to the security forces and central government authority over the next two years,” Ayham Kamel, director of the Middle East and North Africa department at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm in Washington, said in an assessment emailed to clients. He said the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria would “use cash reserves from Mosul’s banks, military equipment from seized military and police bases, and the release of 2,500 fighters from local jails to bolster its miliary and financial capacity.”

The army responded to the rout on Tuesday by bombing at least one military base that had been captured by the militants, but there was no immediate sign of a broader offensive to reclaim the city.

The fighting in Mosul intensified early Tuesday, when the militants stormed the offices of the provincial governor. Later on Tuesday, dozens of army and police vehicles were burning in the streets, witnesses said. The militants, patrolling the city in pickup trucks and flying the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, tried to calm civilians by saying they did not intend to fight the city’s residents. But that did nothing to stem a mass exodus from the city.

Iraqi officials said the attack provided further evidence of contagion from the war in neighboring Syria. The Iraqi Parliament speaker, Osama al-Nujaifi, called the fighting a “foreign invasion of Iraq, carried out by terrorist groups from different countries.”

As fears mounted that the militant offensive would broaden to other Iraqi provinces, there was condemnation of the army, whose commanders and soldiers had abandoned their posts in the city.

“The prison was left to the hands of criminals, and opened,” Mr. Nujaifi said in a televised address, referring to reports that inmates were running free on the streets of Mosul. The army even abandoned the airport, he said. “What happened was a disaster, based on all measures,” he said.

Zuhair al-Aaraji, a member of Parliament from Mosul, said that government security forces fled from some places without firing a shot. “They left their weapons and their equipment and ran away,” he said. “All these weapons are under the control of the militants now.

NY Times