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The Siege of Mosul: What’s Happening? Why is it Significant?
posted on June 12, 2014CNN’s Laura Smith-Spark and Nic Robertson report on this week’s extremist takeover of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. Militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a radical offshoot of al-Qaeda, seized much of the city on Monday and Tuesday, displacing more than 500,000 civilians, while Iraqi troops offered little resistance. They write, “The devastating militant advance, which had been building for some time, is proving an object lesson of much that is wrong in Iraq and the region—growing sectarian tensions at home and a festering civil war over the border in Syria.”