BAGHDAD — Sunni militants who overran the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, striking a major strategic blow against the government in Baghdad, have advanced around 110 miles south toward the Iraqi capital and have arrived at the oil refining town of Baiji, security officials said on Wednesday.
Word of the advance came as a United Nations agency reported that some 500,000 people had fled Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, after militants from the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, spilling over the border from Syria, took over military bases, police stations, banks and provincial headquarters.
On Tuesday the militants, reinforced with captured weaponry abandoned by the fleeing government forces, had raised their black banner over streets littered with the bodies of soldiers, police officers and civilians. The success of the militant attack was the most stunning development in a rapidly widening insurgency straddling the porous border of Iraq and Syria.
Baiji lies south of Mosul and 140 miles north of Baghdad along a main north-south highway. The city has a population of 200,000, is home to a major oil refinery and lies just north of Tikrit, once best known as the hometown of Saddam Hussein.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/world/middleeast/iraq.html
