BAGHDAD: Al-Qaeda seized control of Iraq’s third biggest city on Tuesday, freeing thousands of comrades in a series of jailbreaks and sparking a mass exodus of refugees.
The assault on the city of Mosul, 225 miles north west of Baghdad, saw the Iraqi army retreat to the outskirts after a sustained assault by men armed with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
As well as seizing the main governorate building – forcing the city’s governor to flee – the gunmen were also reported to have gained control of three different jails, numerous police stations and an airport, where several military planes and helicopters were based.
The loss of the city, home to around one million people, is potentially a huge challenge to the Iraqi government, which has been struggling to quell a regalvanised al-Qaeda insurgency for more than two years.
As residents fled in their thousands, they spoke of seeing militants raising black flags from Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) an al-Qaeda’s affiliate, and of newly-released prisoners running through the streets in yellow jumpsuits.
“Mosul now is like hell. It’s up in flames,” said Amina Ibrahim, who like many others was heading for northern Iraq’s more stable Kurdish-controlled zone. “I lost my husband in a bomb blast last year, I don’t want my kids to follow him.”
ISIL is a joint Iraqi-Syrian al-Qaida affiliate that is also fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in neighbouring Syria. Seizing control of Mosul, which lies on a stretch of the Tigris less than 100 miles from the Syrian border, would help the group in its aim of carving out a swathe of uncontested territory straddling the two borders.
“The city of Mosul is outside the control of the state and at the mercy of the militants,” an interior ministry official told AFP news agency, saying soldiers had fled after removing their uniforms.
Several residents said that the militants were now touring the city with loudspeakers, announcing that they had “come to liberate Mosul and would fight only those who attack them”.
“The situation is chaotic inside the city and there is nobody to help us,” said Umm Karam, a government employee. “We are afraid… There is no police or army in Mosul.”
The assault follows similar attempts by ISIL in January to seize the western cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, which Iraqi security forces are still fighting to regain control of some five months on.
Mosul, however, represents a potentially far bigger prize, as the regional capital of the non-Kurdish section of northern Iraq. It has been a stronghold of al-Qaeda for nearly a decade, ever since militants attempted a similar takeover in late 2004, when US troops were in control. While other Iraqi cities were later largely cleared of al-Qaeda during the US troop “surge” in 2007, the group was never properly routed from Mosul, where it has since rebuilt its presence.
Last year, diplomats in Baghdad told The Telegraph that the group had also established a thriving Mafia-style extortion empire in the city, raking in up to £1 million a month in “protection” fees from local businesses.
Security officials also attribute the spike in violence to the organisational capabilities of the new local leader of al-Qaeda, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who formed ISIL under the nom de guerre of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
As well as strings of attacks involving car bombings and gun assaults, al-Baghdadi organised a previous mass jail break from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad last summer, freeing an estimated 500 hard-core militants.
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