LIZ SLY & AHMED RAMADAN
Washington Post
June 10, 2014
BEIRUT — Insurgents seized control early Tuesday of most of the
northern Iraqi city of Mosul, including the provincial government
headquarters, offering a powerful demonstration of the mounting threat
posed by extremists to Iraq’s teetering stability.
Fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al-Qaeda
offshoot, overran the entire western bank of the city overnight after
Iraqi soldiers and police apparently fled their posts, in some instances
discarding their uniforms as they sought to escape the advance of the
militants.
In Baghdad, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced a “general
mobilization” and asked parliament to declare a state of emergency,
saying the government would not allow the area to fall “under the
shadows of terror and terrorists.”
Iraq’s speaker of parliament, Osama Nujaifi, said Mosul, Iraq’s
third-largest city and the effective capital of northern Iraq, is now
entirely in insurgent hands.
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