Jihadist militants in Iraq close in on Baghdad
- 10 years ago
Fierce fighting continues in Iraq with Jihadist militants reportedly seizing two areas close to the capital Baghdad.
The rapidly expanding insurgency appears to have completely caught Iraqi authorities off guard.
Earlier, in the north of the country convoys of Sunni Islamist rebels were filmed parading through the city of Mosul.
State TV also showed footage of what it said were Iraqi aircraft firing missiles at insurgent targets in Mosul. But despite that response, government forces appear to have all but evaporated from Iraq’s second biggest city forcing as many as half a million people to flee.
Further south in Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikret, an online video purportedly showed a column of hundreds, possibly thousands of Iraqi government troops without uniform being marched under guard. Other footage from city also claimed to show Islamist forces capturing a number of Iraqi army tanks.
Elsewhere in Kirkuk, forces of Iraq’s autonomous ethnic Kurdish seized control of the city filling the power vacuum left by Iraqi government troops.
The rapidly expanding insurgency appears to have completely caught Iraqi authorities off guard.
Earlier, in the north of the country convoys of Sunni Islamist rebels were filmed parading through the city of Mosul.
State TV also showed footage of what it said were Iraqi aircraft firing missiles at insurgent targets in Mosul. But despite that response, government forces appear to have all but evaporated from Iraq’s second biggest city forcing as many as half a million people to flee.
Further south in Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikret, an online video purportedly showed a column of hundreds, possibly thousands of Iraqi government troops without uniform being marched under guard. Other footage from city also claimed to show Islamist forces capturing a number of Iraqi army tanks.
Elsewhere in Kirkuk, forces of Iraq’s autonomous ethnic Kurdish seized control of the city filling the power vacuum left by Iraqi government troops.