Liz Sly and Ahmed Ramadan of the Washington Post report thatInsurgents seize Iraqi city of Mosul as troops flee
BEIRUT — Insurgents seized control early Tuesday of most of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, including the provincial government headquarters, offering a powerful demonstration of the mounting threat posed by extremists to Iraq’s teetering stability.
Fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al-Qaeda offshoot, overran the entire western bank of the city overnight after Iraqi soldiers and police apparently fled their posts, in some instances discarding their uniforms as they sought to escape the advance of the militants.
In Baghdad, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced a “general mobilization” and asked parliament to declare a state of emergency, saying the government would not allow the area to fall “under the shadows of terror and terrorists. ... “When the battle got tough in the city of Mosul, the troops dropped their weapons and abandoned their posts, making it an easy prey for the terrorists,” he told a televised news conference in Baghdad.
The airport and the prisons are also under control by the insurgents.
Republicans will probably blame this collapse of Iraqi troops on the Obama administration, but it is clear the not only the justification for the war fabricated by the Bush Administration let by Dick Cheney bogus, but the entire neocon strategy and concept of post war stability deeply flawed from the beginning.
This represents yet more evidence of the failure of the neocon ideology from top to bottom, and will not be the last.