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Militants Sweeping Toward Baghdad
BAGHDAD Sunni militants extended their control over parts of northern and western Iraq on Wednesday as Iraqi government forces crumbled in disarray. The militants overran the city of Tikrit, seized facilities in the strategic oil refining town of Baiji, and threatened an important Shiite shrine in Samarra as they moved south toward Baghdad.
The remarkably rapid advance of the Sunni militants, who on Tuesday seized the northern city of Mosul as Iraqi forces fled or surrendered, reflects the spillover of the Sunni insurgency in Syria and the inability of Iraqs Shiite-led government to pacify the country after American forces departed in 2011 following eight years of war and occupation.
By late Wednesday, witnesses in Samarra, 70 miles north of Baghdad, were reporting that the militants, many of them aligned with the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS, were on the outskirts of the city. They said the militants demanded that forces loyal to the government leave the city or a sacred Shiite shrine there would be destroyed. Samarra is known for the shrine, the al-Askari Mosque, which was severely damaged in a 2006 bombing during the height of the American-led occupation. That event touched off sectarian mayhem between the countrys Sunni Arab minority and its Shiite majority.
Members of Shiite militias were on high alert in Baghdad, and many were reported headed north to Samarra, even though the central government declared a 10 p.m. curfew in the capital and surrounding towns. An influential Iraqi Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, called for the formation of a special force to defend religious sites in Iraq. The authorities in neighboring Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, canceled all visas and flights for pilgrims to Baghdad and intensified security on the Iran-Iraq border, Irans official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/world/middleeast/iraq.html?hp&_r=0
malaise
(268,702 posts)The war criminals to Mosul tomorrow
spanone
(135,792 posts)malaise
(268,702 posts)TwilightGardener
(46,416 posts)HooptieWagon
(17,064 posts)Those idiots fucked up everything they touched.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)Yet the media still gives these miscreants credence. What a mess.
louis-t
(23,267 posts)Is PNAC ever right about anything?
Vattel
(9,289 posts)when it demanded that the Iraqi government reject Obama's proposal to keep some Americans in Iraq.