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| Volunteers in Baghdad gathered to form auxiliary militias to help defend the Iraqi capital. Credit Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times PANIC SWEEPS BAGHDAD... 'Growing Desperation'... Teetering Toward Civil War... Top Cleric Urges Iraqis To Defend Country... Reports Of Executions, Rapes, Kidnappings... UN: 300,000 In Iraq Became Refugees This Week... FIRM: Obama Rules Out Ground Troops... 'Urgently' Considering Airstrikes... Decision Within Days... 'Not Solely Or Even Primarily A Military Challenge'... Iran Uneasy: Sends In Elite Units... So Alarmed It May Cooperate With Washington... Iraqis Who Fled Mosul Say They Prefer Militants To Government... |
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| Vehicles with people who fled Mosul lined up at the Khazer checkpoint in northern Iraq on Saturday. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times |
Rebels Stall North of Baghdad as Residents Brace for a Siege
N.Y. TIMES
A rebel juggernaut that captured Iraq’s second-largest city and raced nearly 200 miles south in three days, raising fears of an imminent assault on Baghdad, stalled for a second day on Saturday about 60 miles north of the capital, leaving residents bracing for a siege that so far has not happened.
While some Baghdad residents scrambled to leave, hoarded food or rushed to join auxiliary militias to defend the city, the militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and their allies halted their advance within a two-hour drive, and there was no indication that they were seeking to push into Baghdad proper.
The rebel leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had boasted that he would soon take the capital and press on to the Shiite heartland in southern Iraq, fell silent as his followers worked to consolidate their gains in predominantly Sunni parts of the country, instead of trying to fight their way through more heavily defended, Shiite-dominated areas.
The Iraqi authorities used the breather to recruit citizens to reinforce the country’s beleaguered military, while worried Baghdad residents began to stockpile essentials, sending prices skyrocketing on Saturday, the end of the Iraqi weekend. Cooking gas quadrupled in price, to about $20 on Saturday from about $5 on Thursday for a 35-pound container. The dollar, normally stable here, spiked about 5 percent overnight. And the price of potatoes increased sixfold, to about $4.50 a pound.
The Sunni extremists now hold sway across a broad swath of territory beginning about 60 miles north of the capital, and extending 220 miles north to Mosul and 200 miles west to the deserts of Anbar Province, where the insurgents have controlled the city of Falluja for the past six months.
The territory essentially reconstitutes what the American military, during its war here, called the Sunni Triangle: an area where Sunnis predominate and which provided fertile ground for the rise of the Sunni insurgency. It was also the area that cost the Americans by far the most casualties of the war.
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| An Iraqi Shiite cleaned weapons on Friday as he prepared to defend his Sadr City district in Baghdad in the event of an attack by Sunni militants. Credit Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
Shiites Flock to Join Militias
It was only three weeks ago that Mr. Maliki, given the number of seats his bloc had won, seemed to be in a strong position to secure a third term as prime minister. Yet his country now seemed in danger of slipping away from him. Sunni militants were in full control of Mosul and Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, while the Kurds, ostensibly his allies, had taken over Kirkuk, an oil-rich city that they had long coveted.
But it was more than that, as Iraq’s millions of Shiites knew very well. The United States invasion and occupation had handed them a once in a millennium opportunity to rule. And now, in a matter of five or six years, they seemed on the verge of squandering it. The sacred Shiite shrines at Samarra, Karbala and Najaf were threatened by the militants and their leaders in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, who had sworn to level the sites.
But the idea of bringing back Shiite militias sent a shudder through many, raising chilling memories of the sectarian war that raged in Iraq from 2005 through 2008, with torture chambers, ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods and bodies dumped in the Tigris with holes drilled in victims’ heads. Such a war, once unleashed, would be hard to quell, and Shiite leaders were well aware that the Sunni militants were willing to start one.
For now the Shiite militias-in-formation are maintaining that they are not anti-Sunni. But distrust, if not unspoken loathing, is apparent — a mirror image of the Sunni militants’ views of the Shiites and a disturbing omen for the days ahead.That Shiites feel they have to turn to militias to guarantee their protection is testimony to the country’s slide into chaos. The Iraqi Army, which the Americans spent around $20 billion trying to rebuild as a multi-sect, multiethnic force, has been so riven by sectarianism that it is unable or unwilling to protect Iraqi citizens and fight enemies of the Iraqi state in an evenhanded way.