Iraqi rebels stall north of Baghdad as residents brace for siege
Baghdad — A rebel juggernaut that captured Iraq’s second- l argest city and raced nearly 200 miles south in three days, raising fears of the imminent assault on Baghdad, stalled for a second day 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 of Iraq and the Levant and their allies halted their advance within a two-hour drive to the north, 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.
There were reports of fresh clashes in Dujail, Ishaki and Dhuliuya in Salahuddin province, just north of Baghdad, as newly armed Shiite militias surged to confront the largely Sunni insurgents. However, there did not appear to be any decisive engagements between the insurgents and the Iraqi military, and there was no clear evidence to support a claim by an Iraqi general on Saturday that the Iraqi army had rolled the militants back in on those towns.
Reinforce, stockpile
The Iraqi authorities exploited the breather to recruit citizens to reinforce the country’s beleaguered military, while worried Baghdad residents began to stockpile essentials, sending prices skyrocketing Saturday, the end of the Iraqi weekend. Cooking gas quadrupled in price, from about $ 5 on Thursday to about $20 on Saturday for a 35- pound container. The dollar, normally stable here, spiked about 5 percent overnight. And the price of potatoes increased sixfold, to about $10 a kilogram.
A military spokesman, Gen. Qassim Atta, said government forces had reclaimed ground in the northern provinces of Salahuddin, Diyala and Ninevah, and insisted the capital was safe.
“The security in Baghdad is 100 percent stable,” Atta said. “The majority of Salahuddin province has been regained. The morale of the security forces is very high.”
But there were reports of continued skirmishing Saturday in many of the places he said were back in government control.
The advance of the Sunni extremists brought under their influence 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 Fallujah for the past six months.
The territory essentially reconstitutes what the U. S. military, during its war here, called the Sunni Triangle, an area where Sunnis predominated and which provided fertile ground for the rise of the Sunni insurgency and allies including expelled officials of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. It was also the area that cost the Americans by far the most casualties of the war.
The new Sunni Triangle’s apex extends farther north than before, reaching beyond Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown, another 140 miles north into Ninevah province. Its base is not quite as far south as before. In 2008, it included a belt of Sunni communities south of Baghdad, leaving the city surrounded; now, the base remains north and just west of the capital, although as close as the western suburb of Abu Ghraib, where there have been reports of scattered insurgent violence.
The new Sunni Triangle does not encircle the capital the way the old one did, which made travel outside Baghdad a matter of braving a hostile gauntlet. But this time the militants have managed to imperil all three of the major highways to the north and Kurdistan, effectively cutting Kurdistan off from the rest of Iraq and worsening the risk that the country could be dismembered. During the U. S. war, all roads to the north remained open, if dangerous, and those to Kurdistan were safe once travelers left the capital.
Also, the Sunni Triangle during the U. S. war never posed an existential threat to the country, and the possibility that militants might overrun Baghdad. U. S. military might, heavy air support, and intense intelligence efforts made that scenario implausible.
None of that exists now. The Iraqis have said they would welcome outside aid, and officials have warned they might have to ask for Iranian assistance if America is not forthcoming, particularly
Iran allied with U.S.?
On Saturday, Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, said that Iran would not rule out working together with the United States to battle Sunni extremist fighters in Iraq, but was waiting for the United States to make a move.
“We have said that all countries must unite in combating terrorism,” he said. “But right now regarding Iraq we have not seen the Americans taking a decision yet.”
While not directly denying that Iran has sent troops to help Iraq already, as some news media have reported, Rouhani said the Iraqi government has so far not asked for Iranian help.
“If the Iraqi government asks us for help, we may provide any assistance the Iraqi nationwouldlikeustoprovide in the fight against terrorism,” he said. “However, the engagement of Iranian forces has not been discussed.”
Iraqi officials have been particularly hopeful that the Americans could provide air support, as their own capabilities are limited. That became evident Saturday, when one of the Iraqi military’s few helicopters was shot down in Tikrit, according to security sources; another was reportedly shot down Thursday, and two were captured by the militants in Mosul.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush to sail from the North Arabian Sea and into the Persian Gulf on Saturday, positioning the vessel and its warplanes closer to Iraq, Pentagon officials said.
The carrier is accompanied by two other Navy warships carrying long-range missiles.
The order will provide President Barack Obama “additional flexibility should military options be required to protect American lives, citizens and interests in Iraq,” Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement.
Helicopter joy rides
The militants, however, did little to press their gains. They boasted that they took the captured helicopters on a joy ride from Mosul to Salahuddin, and posted a video on YouTube showing their soldiers tooling around Tikrit in a captured tank. Captured Iraqi army Humvees were shown being paraded in Raqqa, a town the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant controls across the Iraqi border in Syria.
None of that captured hardware was so far showing up on the Iraqi front lines.
By Thursday, the militants said they had surrounded Samarra, a Sunni Triangle town important to Shiites because of an important shrine there, and were negotiating the defenders’ surrender. On Friday, Prime Minister Nouri alMaliki flew there and toured the shrine as local journalists reported that fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant were in villages just outside Samarra.
If al-Maliki was concerned by the collapse of his military, he did not show it.
“We’re going to punish all the people who left their posts,” he said. “It was not a lack of weapons, it was a conspiracy.”
The day before, his government had been bolstered by a call from the Shiites’ supreme religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, for all able-bodied men to join the fight against the insurgents.
Thousands of civilian volunteers, most of them Shia, turned out to join militia units that would fight alongside the army. While an impressive show of support for the government among the Shia majority, it was hardly a vote of confidence in a military that has so far not engaged the insurgents face-to-face on any large scale, even though they have been moving through the Iraqi deserts in battalionsized military columns, with trucks and seized equipment.
“They moved very fast from the north because of the people there, all Sunnis,” said Sheikh Rahman Abdullah al Saidi, a Shia leader who was organizing volunteers in Husseiniya, a neighborhood in northern Baghdad that is athwart one of the major highways from the Sunni Triangle. “They wouldn’t move a mile once they get down in the south.”
Reasons for pause unclear
So far, at least, the insurgents seem to have realized that as well.
On Wednesday, al- Baghdadi’s message to his followers was urgent and strident: “Stand against the Shia campaign and head to Baghdad and the south to invade the Shia in their homes,” he said. “All Sunni eyes are on you now and your brothers in Syria are waiting for you.”
Whether the militants had given up on Baghdad, or just paused to reconsider their next move, was unclear.
People in the capital were both relieved and still worried. Runs on banks stopped, and gasoline for cars was no longer running out, even as other products spiked in price. Flights out remained overbooked.
“The danger threatening Baghdad and the surrounding areas, which is ISIS, is just 122 kilometers away from Baghdad,” said Hisham al-Habobi, an independent political analyst in Baghdad, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, “and this means they can be here in two hours.”