Militants who seized large swaths of Iraq's Sunni heartland with lightning advances this week have pushed into an ethnically mixed province and captured two towns northeast of Baghdad, officials said Friday as neighboring Shiite powerhouse Iran signaled its willingness to confront the growing threat.
The fresh gains by insurgents, spearheaded by fighters from the Al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, come as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shiite-led government struggles to form a coherent response after the militants blitzed and captured the country's second-largest city of Mosul, Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, smaller communities, as well as military and police bases -- often after meeting little resistance from state security forces.
Iran has built close political and economic ties with postwar Iraq, and many influential Iraqi Shiites have lived for stretches of time in the Islamic Republic.
Police officials said militants driving in machinegun-mounted pickups entered the two newly conquered towns in Diyala province late Thursday -- Jalula, 125 kilometers (80 miles) northeast of Baghdad, and Sadiyah, 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of the Iraqi capital.
Three planeloads of Americans were being evacuated from a major Iraqi air base in Sunni territory north of Baghdad, U.S. officials said Thursday, and Germany urged its citizens to immediately leave parts of Iraq, including Baghdad.
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