The insurgent offensive threatening Iraq spread to the northwest of the country on Sunday, when Sunni militants launched a dawn raid on a town close to the Syrian border, yet Iraq claimed that its security forces had "regained the initiative" after stalling the militants' march toward Baghdad.
As the rapid advance south by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) toward Baghdad appeared to slow over the weekend, fierce fighting erupted in the town of Tal Afar 60 kilometers (40 miles) west of Mosul near the Syrian border, security sources and a local official said.
ISIL jihadist fighters and other Sunni Muslim armed groups stormed several towns on the road to Baghdad after seizing Mosul nearly a week ago - an offensive that only stalled as it approached the mainly Shi'ite capital on Saturday.
The offensive brought the militants to within 50 kilometers of Baghdad.
Iraqi security forces have generally performed poorly, with some abandoning their vehicles and positions and discarding their uniforms, though they seem to have begun to recover from the initial onslaught and have started to regain ground, Reuters reported.
Iraqi commanders have said their forces were starting to push the militants back, and that soldiers had recaptured two towns north of Baghdad, with a spokesman announcing that Iraqi security personnel had killed 279 "terrorists" in the past 24 hours.
Iraqi officials however often announce large militant tolls, with no way of independent verification, and downplay their own casualties, the French news agency AFP reported.
U.S., Iran reaction
On Saturday, Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gave the order that the USS George H.W. Bush move from the North Arabian Sea to the Persian Gulf in response to the crisis in Iraq.
However, while expressing support for Iraq's government, the United States has stressed the need for a political solution to a crisis threatening to fracture the country less than three years after the U.S. military withdrawal.
Secretary of State John Kerry told Iraq's foreign minister in a call on Saturday that U.S. assistance would only succeed if Iraqi leaders set aside their differences and forged the national unity needed to confront the insurgent threat.
U.S. President Barack Obama said on Friday he was reviewing military options, short of sending troops, to combat the insurgency, and Iran held out the prospect of working with its longtime U.S. arch-enemy to help restore security in Iraq.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Saturday that Iraq had not asked Iran for help.
But in surprise comments Rouhani added that Iran may "think about" cooperating with its arch-foe the United States to fight the militants in Iraq, despite the lack of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington for more than three decades.
Iran meanwhile warned on Sunday that "any foreign military intervention in Iraq" would only complicate the crisis, AFP reported.
"Iraq has the capacity and necessary preparations for the fight against terrorism and extremism," foreign ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.
Iraq volunteers
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's security spokesman, Lieutenant General Qassem Atta, also said during a televised news conference that Baghdad had "regained the initiative," AFP reported.
Baghdad's forces will be joined by a flood of volunteers, urged on by a call to arms from top Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
A recruitment center for such volunteers at the town of Khales in central Iraq came under mortar attack on Sunday, leaving six people dead, including three Iraqi soldiers, police and a doctor told AFP.
Volunteers were to join the army's fight to regain control of the northern town of Udhaim from ISIL militants.
The advance alarmed both al-Maliki's Shi'ite supporters in Iran and officials in the United States, which helped bring him to power after its 2003 invasion that toppled Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein.
Photos on Islamic website
Also on Sunday, ISIL posted graphic photos online that appear to show its fighters massacring dozens of captured Iraqi soldiers, according to an AP report.
The pictures on a militant website appear to show ISIL masked fighters loading the captives, dressed in civilian clothes, onto flatbed trucks before forcing them to lie face-down in a shallow ditch with their arms tied behind their backs.
The final images show the bodies of the captives soaked in blood after being shot.
The captions of the photos said the killings were to avenge the killing of an ISIL commander, Abdul-Rahman al-Beilawy, whose death was reported by both the government and ISIL shortly before the al-Qaida splinter group's lightning offensive.
Iraq's top military spokesman, Lieutenant General Qassim al-Moussawi, confirmed the photos' authenticity and said he was aware of cases of mass murder of captured Iraqi soldiers in areas held by ISIL, the AP reported.
Most of the soldiers who appear in the pictures are in civilian clothes. Some are shown wearing military uniforms underneath, indicating they may have hastily disguised themselves as civilians to try to escape.
The captions did not provide a date or location, but al-Moussawi said the killings took place in Salahuddin province, the capital of which is Tikrit.
Regained some territory
Maliki's security forces and allied militias regained some territory on Saturday, easing part of the pressure on his Shi'ite-led government, and officials said they were regaining the initiative. Maliki has vowed to rout the insurgents.
But Sunday's fighting in Tal Afar, a majority Turkomen town which is home to both Shi'ites and Sunnis, showed how volatile the deepening sectarian divisions have become.
Residents in Sunni districts accused Shi'ite police and army forces of launching mortar fire at their neighborhoods, prompting ISIL forces stationed outside the town to move in.
“The situation is disastrous in Tal Afar. There is crazy fighting and most families are trapped inside houses, they can't leave town,” a local official said. “If the fighting continues, a mass killing among civilians could result.”
In Baghdad on Sunday, a suicide attacker detonated explosives in a vest he was wearing, killing at least nine people and wounding 20 in a crowded street in the center of the capital, police and medical sources said.
Syrian air strike
Across the border, a Syrian government air raid hit near ISIL's headquarters in the eastern city of Raqqa, activists said.
Raqqa, the first and only Syrian city to fall to insurgents since Syria's conflict began more than three years ago, has been a major base for ISIL since it evicted rival rebels including al-Qaida's Syrian affiliate during infighting this year.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said warplanes targeted the governorate building, a large structure in the center of town, as well as two other buildings, including a sharia, or Islamic law, court.
Images posted by ISIL supporters online showed a hole surrounded by rubble in the pavement outside the governorate building, although the date and authenticity could not be verified. It was unclear if the building itself was damaged.
There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Oil prices have risen to the highest level this year over fears of the violence disrupting exports from OPEC member Iraq.
Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby said Arab foreign ministers will discuss the “dangerous situation in Iraq” at a meeting in the Saudi city of Jeddah in the next two days.
Refugees may increase
A Kurdish local official said on Sunday that he expected the number of refugees fleeing violence from Mosul to Arbil to increase, Reuters reported.
An estimated 500,000 Iraqis have already fled Mosul, home to some 2 million people, and the surrounding province, the International Organization for Migration said.
Most families fled north toward the nearby Kurdistan region, where Iraq's ethnic Kurds have autonomy and their own large and disciplined military force, the peshmerga.
“About 110,000 displaced people and 100 families have arrived in Arbil from Mosul, and the number is set to increase. Only five percent of the displaced families have returned to their areas, now controlled by peshmerga forces,” the mayor of Aska Kalak sub-district in Arbil, Rizgar Mustafa, said.
“We have a plan in coordination with U.N. agencies and NGOs to set up a refugee camp for 3,500 families, because we think that the war in the region won't end soon and the fighting will take long time, so there will be more refugees. We, as a government, are ready to receive the large numbers of refugees,” he added.
Syria's civil war
Also, former U.N. mediator Lakhdar Brahimi blamed the crisis on global neglect of Syria's civil war.
Brahimi, the former U.N. and Arab League envoy to Syria, told AFP the international community's neglect of the conflict in neighboring Syria had precipitated the crisis in Iraq.
"It is a well-known rule: a conflict of this kind (in Syria) cannot stay confined within the borders of one country," said Brahimi.
The international community "unfortunately neglected the Syrian problem and did not help to resolve it. This is the result," said Brahimi, who resigned from his post as UN-Arab League representative to Syria in May.
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