Sunni militants brought their campaign against the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki closer to Baghdad on Monday, attacking a police convoy just 20 miles from the centre of the capital and triggering a shootout that left at least 81 people dead.
Rebels of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham struck the convoy in Babil province on the main highway leading south from Baghdad. In the exchange of fire that followed, at least 71 prisoners in police custody, five policemen and five insurgents were killed, security officials said.
In a gruesome sign of the Sunni-Shia hatred now fuelling the conflict, into its third week, the bodies of 15 Shia fighters were returned to the town of Basheer, 2 miles south of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq.
The fighters, which included one woman, were defending the Shia-dominated town from an ISIS assault when they were captured by rebels, strung up on electrical poles and lynched. Their bodies were kept hanging for days until they were taken down by Sunni tribal leaders and transported by tractor to Basheer on Monday.
The brutality of the fighting underlined the determination of Sunni insurgents to tighten their grip over areas in the north of the country where they now hold sway after driving out government forces.
Nour al-Dine Kablan, an official in Mosul, said Monday that ISIS rebels were in control of most of the military airport in nearby Tal Afar. Rebels and government forces have been fighting for control of the city of 200,000 people, located 270 miles northwest of Baghdad, near Iraq’s border with Syria.
The Iraqi Army commander in charge of Tal Afar, Maj. Gen. Mohammed al-Quraishi, fled the ISIS offensive to the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan. There, local TV stations have shown him posing with Kurdish Peshmerga forces.
The retreat is widely seen as a personal humiliation for Maliki, who ordered Gen. Quraishi to Tal Afar to retake the city after dismissing the general’s predecessor for poor performance in battle.
The government’s military spokesman, Gen. Qassim Atta, denied that Gen. Quraishi had fled Tal Afar, dismissing the news as “propaganda” at a news conference on Monday.
In another notable setback for Maliki and his Shiite-dominated government, one of the few Sunni towns in the country that supports him surrendered to insurgents on Monday after days of fighting with ISIS-led militants.
A delegation from Al Alam in northern Tikrit province, surrendered to insurgents and handed over government-issued weapons and vehicles to them, security officials said.
“The truce came after the army abandoned us. We were surrounded,” said a resident of the town, sounding a now-familiar scenario since ISIS insurgents attacked and took over Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, two weeks ago.
The truce with the rebels, who now occupy the president palace in Tikrit, called for the merger of the insurgents, able-bodied residents and police into one military force, the town resident said, adding that the police were first required to ask ISIS for redemption.