By SUADAD AL-SALHY
Jun 2014
A Kurdish security officer stood guard as families fleeing the violence in the Iraqi city of Mosul waited at a checkpoint near Arbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan. CreditReuters
BAGHDAD — 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, the airport 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 and surrounding Nineveh Province. 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 with the war in neighboring Syria.
Mosul was the last major urban area of Iraq to be pacified by American troops before they left, and the violence there threatened to broaden into the adjacent autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, which has its own armed forces, the peshmerga. BasNews, an independent news agency in Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan autonomous region, reported on Monday that Kurdish military forces had been ordered to the outskirts of Mosul to protect Kurds threatened by the Sunni insurgents.
Iraqis at a checkpoint near the Iraqi city of Arbil on Tuesday. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki ordered a state of emergency for the entire country.CreditSafin Hamed/Agence France-Presse
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 following eight years of war and occupation.
By midday on Tuesday, militants belonging 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, who have increasingly operated with impunity in that region even as President Bashar al-Assad has reclaimed ground lost to the insurgents elsewhere in 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.
An Agence France-Presse journalist based in Mosul, seeking to flee the city with his family, reported shuttered shops, at least one police station set afire, many vehicles of the security forces abandoned or burned, and hundreds of residents, escaping in overloaded cars or on foot, carrying whatever they could.
Others reported that the were militants collecting military equipment abandoned by the fleeing Iraqi forces, much of it American-made. Jenan Moussa, a reporter for Al Aan TV, a Dubai-based Arab satellite television network, posted on her Twitter account a photograph of what she described as a pair of Humvees that had already been driven into Syria.
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.
A broader Sunni insurgency that has been growing in neighboring Syria has shown increased audacity in Iraq.
The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is an expanded version of Al Qaeda in Iraq that controls a number of cities in northeastern Syria and western Iraq. Its brutal tactics alienated it from the Syrian rebel movement, as did the fact it has emphasized the establishment of an Islamic state over the fight against Mr. Assad. It was officially disowned by Al Qaeda in February.
The Sunni insurgent group has emerged as the leading force for the foreign fighters streaming into Syria, exploiting the chaos of the civil war as it tries to lay the groundwork for an Islamic state.
Al Qaeda’s central leadership cut ties with ISISearlier this year as it rushed to build an Islamic state on its own terms, antagonizing the wider Syrian rebel movement.
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 erasing the border with Syria and establishing an Islamic state that transcends both.
“The Iraqi-Syrian border has been steadily disappearing over the last few months with ISIS gains,” Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow with the Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in an email message. “This episode is probably the biggest example to date of the failure to keep up with and contain the Syria crisis.”
With its soldiers on the run, the Iraq 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.
“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.
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The New York Times
Mr. Kamel 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.
Suadad Al-Salhy reported from Baghdad, Kareem Fahim from Amman, Jordan, and Rick Gladstone from New York.
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