Sunni militants captured the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar early on Monday, its mayor and residents said, the latest blow to the Shiite-led government a week after it lost a vast swath of territory in the country's north.
The town, with a population of some 200,000 people, mostly ethnic Shiite and Sunni Turkomen, was taken just before dawn, Mayor Abdulal Abdoul told The Associated Press.
The ethnic mix of Tal Afar, 420 kilometers (260 miles) northwest of Baghdad, raises the grim specter of large-scale atrocities by Sunni militants of the al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, who already claim to have killed hundreds of Shiites in areas they captured last week.
A Tal Afar resident reached by phone confirmed the town's fall and said militants in pickup trucks mounted with machineguns and flying black jihadi banners were roaming the streets as gunfire rang out.
The fall of Tal Afar comes a week after Sunni militants captured Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, and Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit in a lightening offensive. The town is some 150 kilometers (93 miles) from the border with Syria, where ISIL is fighting against President Bashar Assad's government and controls territory abutting the Iraqi border.
Tal Afar's capture came just hours after Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, addressing volunteers joining the security forces, vowed to retake inch of territory seized by the militants.
"We will march and liberate every inch they defaced, from the country's northernmost point to the southernmost point," al-Maliki said. The volunteers responded with Shiite chants.
Fighting in Tal Afar began on Sunday, with Iraqi government officials saying that ISIL fighters were firing rockets seized from military arms depots in the Mosul area. They said the local garrison suffered heavy casualties and the main hospital was unable to cope with the wounded, without providing exact numbers.
Meanwhile, hundreds of Shiite volunteers in Baghdad piled into army trucks and were driven off to join the fight against Islamic militants in Iraq.
The volunteers gathered at the Federal Police Command headquarters in the Iraqi capital, chanting Shiite religious slogans.
They pledged to join the nation's beleaguered security forces to battle the Sunni militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL.
Thousands of Shiites have heeded a call from their most revered spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to take up arms against the group, which has captured large areas of territory north of Baghdad.
Brigadier General Abbas Fadhil Abdul Sahib said the volunteers were being supplied with army fatigues and would be sent to join Iraqi troops "to fight the enemy".
ISIL has vowed to take the battle to Baghdad and cities farther south housing revered Shiite shrines.
POSITIONS
Saudi Arabia said on Monday it rejected foreign interference in Iraq, after Islamist militants seized broad swathes of the country.
In a cabinet statement published on the official news agency SPA, Riyadh blamed the unfolding crisis on years of "sectarian and exclusionary" policies.
It also urged the "quick formation of a national consensus government."
Meanwhile, a senior U.S. official said the United States may discuss the crisis in Iraq with top Iranian officials on the sidelines of this week's nuclear talks in Vienna, though they will be unrelated to those negotiations.
"There may be discussion of that issue on the margins," the official said on condition of anonymity without giving details.
REUTERS/AP