KIRKUK, Iraq // Islamist militants seized Iraq’s largest Christian town and surrounding areas on Thursday, sending tens of thousands of panicked residents fleeing and prompting an urgent UN Security Council meeting at France’s request.
The onslaught saw the Sunni extremist Islamic State extend its writ over northern Iraq and move within striking distance of the autonomous Kurdistan region, in one of the most dramatic developments of the two-month-old Iraqi conflict.
Residents said the group moved into Qaraqosh and other towns overnight after the withdrawal of Kurdish peshmerga troops, who are stretched thin across several fronts.
“Qaraqosh, Tal Kayf, Bartella and Karamlesh have been emptied of their original population and are now under the control of the militants,” said Joseph Thomas, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Kirkuk and Sulaimaniyah.
The Security Council was to meet late on Thursday “so the international community can mobilise to counter the terrorist threat in Iraq and support and protect the population at risk”, according to the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius.
Qaraqosh, with an almost entirely Christian population of 50,000, lies between Mosul, the militants’ main hub in Iraq, and Erbil, the Kurdish region’s capital.
Tal Kayf, the home of a significant Christian community as well as members of the Shabak Shiite minority, also emptied overnight.
“Tal Kayf is now in the hands of the Islamic State. They faced no resistance and rolled in just after midnight,” said Boutros Sargon, a resident who fled to Erbil.
Pope Francis urged the international community to protect Iraq’s Christians, who have emigrated en masse over the past decade as a result of successive waves of violence.
Chaldean Patriarch Louis Sako, who heads Iraq’s largest Christian denomination, said the overnight offensive had displaced 100,000 Christians.
“This is a humanitarian disaster. The churches are occupied, their crosses were taken down,” he said, adding that 1,500 manuscripts had been burnt.
The latest numbers dwarf the exodus sparked last month by an Islamic State ultimatum to Mosul’s Christians to convert to Islam, pay protection money or leave on pain of death.
A peshmerga spokesman said Kurdish forces were battling the Islamic State in Qaraqosh and Al Qosh further north, as well as in Gwer, a Kurdish community south of Qaraqosh.
Islamic State militants on Thursday also captured Mosul dam, the country’s largest, after days of fighting, according to an employee on site and local officials.
The new gains come days after the group took over most of the Mosul hinterland occupied by the peshmerga after government forces retreated in June, including the Sinjar area, from which tens of thousands of civilians fled.
The group’s latest advance now puts it within striking distance, in some areas barely 20 kilometres, of the official border of the Kurdish region and 40 kilometres from Erbil.
Summi militants led by Islamic State launched a devastating offensive on June 9, seizing Mosul, Iraq’s second city the next day and sweeping across much of the Sunni heartland.
Peshmerga forces apparently redeployed to Erbil some of the forces they had assigned to the disputed land they grabbed from the government during the army’s initial debacle.
They also beefed up security in Kirkuk, the most significant conquest they made during the June chaos, but the city was rocked by a car bomb on Thursday.
The blast ripped through a Shiite mosque where displaced people had sought refuge, killing at least eight and wounding 47, police and medical sources said.
The experienced peshmerga were thought to be a sufficient bulwark against massive further advances by the militants, but Islamic State fighters have been moving stealthily across the northern Nineveh province and making surprise gains.
The capture of Sinjar raised concerns for the Yazidi minority, who who sought refuge in barren nearby mountains whete they have been stranded since Saturday with little food and water.
The leaders of the small minority, who practise a 4,000-year-old faith rooted in Zoroastrianism, have warned that their entire community risks being massacred or starved into extinction.
Turkey officials said hundreds of Yazidis had crossed into Turkey but did not specify how they got there.
Even as Sunni militants have been taking control of territory in the north and west of the country, Baghdad has been increasingly targeted by car bombs, with a string of explosions killing at least 66 people on Wednesday and Thursday.
Officials said a suicide car bomber killed at least 15 people at a police checkpoint on Thursday, including nine civilians, in the predominantly Shiite neighbourhood of Kazimiyah.
* Agence France-Presse with additional reporting by Bloomberg News and Associated Press
