Sunni Militants Drive Iraqi Army Out of Mosul

The  Iraqui 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 attacks widened the Sunni insurgency in Iraq and were among the most audacious assaults on the 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 the Sunni insurgency, which 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 now threatens to broaden into the adjacent oil-rich region of Kirkuk and autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, which has its own armed forces, the peshmerga. There were unconfirmed reports late Tuesday that Sunni militants, flush with victory in Mosul, had overrun parts of Kirkuk to the southeast as soldiers and police officers abandoned their posts.