Mohammed Dulaimy

On Day Four of clashes in Mosul between encroaching jihadists and Iraqi security forces, two officers visited an outpost of the Iraqi 2nd Division’s logistics battalion with bad news: they said that all senior commanders had fled.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki urged his parliament Tuesday to declare a nationwide state of emergency after militants from an al Qaida offshoot seized control of a large swath of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in a humiliating sequence of events that saw Iraq’s U.S.-trained security forces abandon their posts, lay down their weapons and flee.

One of Iraq’s top Sunni Muslim leaders on Tuesday delivered a pointed message to Washington: The United States has a moral responsibility to help defeat Iraq’s twin ills of sectarianism and terrorism because those forces were unleashed by the U.S.-led invasion of 2003.