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Iraqi General Insists Baghdad Is Safe From Insurgents Iraq Rebels Stall North of Baghdad as Residents Brace for a Siege
(about 3 hours later)
BAGHDAD — A top Iraqi general claimed on Saturday that Iraqi forces were regaining territory from the insurgents north of Baghdad, and he insisted that there was no risk to the capital. He accused the news media of exaggerating the danger, but other reports from the north indicated that fighting was continuing in several places and that insurgents were fully in control of others. BAGHDAD — A rebel juggernaut that captured Iraq’s second-largest city and raced nearly 200 miles south in three days, raising fears of the imminent fall of 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.
Gen. Qassim Atta, who is now the spokesman for the Iraqi military, said at a news conference that the Iraqi army had retaken several towns along the highway connecting Mosul to Baghdad, and that it had secured the city of Samarra, which has a major Shiite shrine that the militants have threatened to destroy. At one point, militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria came within 55 miles of Baghdad. 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 to the north, and there was no indication that they were seeking to push into Baghdad proper.
“The security in Baghdad is 100 percent stable, the majority of Salahuddin Province has been regained, the morale of the security forces is very high,” said General Atta, who until recently was director of operations for the National Intelligence Service of Iraq, but apparently was appointed military spokesman in the midst of the present crisis. 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.
“Don’t count on what the media are saying,” he said. “It’s not correct or accurate. We have distinguished operations underway and we will announce details after they’re finished, after we start a new battle in Salahuddin, in Diyala, in Nineveh and Kirkuk.” 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.
Residents reported that militants had seized control of Udhaim, the capital of Diyala Province, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. 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 on 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.
General Atta gave few concrete details of the military’s gains, other than to say that Iraqi security forces had “liberated Baiji, Balad, Dujail, Ishaki and al Dulwayiha,” towns in Salahuddin Province. Local journalists in Salahuddin, however, said fighting was still going on in those places. A military spokesman, Gen. Qassim Atta, said government forces had reclaimed ground in the northern provinces of Salahuddin, Diyala and Nineveh, and insisted the capital was safe.
Insurgents downed a military helicopter in central Tikrit, just north of Baghdad, according to eyewitnesses, who said that all the crew members had been killed. The helicopter had been taking part in airstrikes by Iraqi forces against militants in Tikrit and its suburbs that residents said began Saturday morning. “The security in Baghdad is 100 percent stable,” General Atta said. “The majority of Salahuddin Province has been regained. The morale of the security forces is very high.”
Iraqi security forces did regain control of Dhuloiya and Ishaki, towns north of Baghdad, residents, security officials and Shiite militia leaders said. But there were reports of continued skirmishing on Saturday in many of the places he said were back in government control.
General Atta also discussed Nineveh Province, which was overrun by insurgents on Tuesday after they captured and occupied its capital, Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city; and to Kirkuk, which the Iraqi army abandoned, ceding control of the oil-rich area to Kurdish pesh merga militiamen. He said the insurgents remained in many small villages in the north, but “even in Mosul we have security forces functional and working there.” 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 Falluja for the past six months.
Local leaders in Mosul, however, said the insurgents so completely controlled the city that they had begun establishing rules of conduct for residents, many of whom had initially fled but then returned after the militants assured them they would be safe. The territory essentially reconstitutes what the American 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.
“They control everything in Mosul right now,” said a prominent Sunni sheikh in the city, who was critical of the ISIS takeover, but praised their conduct since then. “There’s no shooting. Yesterday they issued a statement with 17 points: No smoking, women must wear hijab. I am standing 35 meters from their headquarters, it’s ultimate security. They didn’t rob the banks, that’s a lie, and they didn’t enter any house. They didn’t shoot even one bullet.” The new Sunni Triangle’s apex extends farther north than before, reaching beyond Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown, another 140 miles north into Nineveh 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.
Although General Atta insisted that the Iraqi military had control of the situation, he also said that centers were being formed for reconstituting the army in Nineveh Province. When the militants attacked Mosul on Tuesday, the army collapsed immediately, giving little or no resistance to the attackers. Many Iraqis attributed that to a preponderance of Kurdish and Sunni troops in Army’s the 2nd Division, which is stationed in the Mosul area. 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 American war, all roads to the north remained open, if dangerous, and those to Kurdistan were safe once travelers left the capital.
In a televised address Friday night, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki spoke from Samarra, about 80 miles north of Baghdad, reassuring listeners that the Shia shrine there was safe. The militants were reported to be on the outskirts north of Samarra by Thursday, but claimed to be negotiating the city’s surrender to its forces to avoid harming the shrine. Also, the Sunni Triangle during the American war never posed an existential threat to the country, and the possibility that militants might overrun Baghdad. American military might, heavy air support, and intense intelligence efforts made that scenario implausible.
“We’re going to punish all the people who left their posts,” Mr. Maliki said in his speech. “It was not a lack of weapons, it was a conspiracy.” 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 American is not forthcoming, particularly in air support. They have denied reports that Iran’s Revolutionary Brigades foreign force, the Al Quds Brigade, is already in the country.
General Atta said the prime minister’s visit to Samarra, where he met with top military commanders, showed that the Iraqi military controlled the area. 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, Mr. 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 nation would like us to provide 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 on Saturday, when one of the Iraqi military’s few helicopters was shot down in Tikrit, according to security sources; another was reportedly shot down on Thursday, and two were captured by the militants in Mosul.
But the militants seemed to do little with 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 ISIS controls across the Iraqi border in Syria.
None of that captured hardware was so far showing up on the Iraqi frontlines.
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 Nuri Kamal al-Maliki flew there and toured the shrine as local journalists reported that ISIS fighters were in villages just outside Samarra.
If Mr. 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, Ayatollah Ali 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 battalion-sized 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.”
So far, at least, the insurgents seem to have realized that as well. On Wednesday, Mr. 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, “and this means they can be here in two hours.”