Caos no Norte do Iraque

As many as 500,000 people have been forced to flee the Iraqi city of Mosul after Islamist militants effectively took control of it, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) says.

Troops were among those fleeing as hundreds of jihadists from the ISIS group overran the city and much of the surrounding province of Nineveh.

PM Nouri Maliki has asked parliament to declare a state of emergency.

The US said the development showed ISIS was a threat to the entire region.

ISIS - the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is also known as ISIL - is an offshoot of al-Qaeda.

It now controls considerable territory in eastern Syria and western and central Iraq, in a campaign to set up a militant enclave straddling the border.
'Chaotic situation'
Residents of Mosul - Iraq's second city - said jihadist flags were flying from buildings and that the militants had announced over loudspeakers they had "come to liberate" the city.

"The situation is chaotic inside the city, and there is nobody to help us," said government worker Umm Karam. "We are afraid."

ISIS in Iraq

• The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has 3,000 to 5,000 fighters, and grew out of an al-Qaeda-linked organisation in Iraq
• ISIS has exploited the standoff between the Iraqi government and the minority Sunni Arab community, which complains that Shia PM Nouri Maliki is monopolising power
• It has already taken over Ramadi and Falluja, but taking over Mosul is a far greater feat than anything the movement has achieved so far, and will send shockwaves throughout the region
• The organisation is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - an obscure figure regarded as a battlefield commander and tactician. He was once the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, one of the groups that later became ISIS.

Staff working for the IOM in Mosul say that all official buildings there have been taken over, including police and military bases, and the airport.

Many police stations were reported to have been set on fire and hundreds of detainees set free.

Dozens of vehicles were destroyed in and around Mosul as the militants advanced

Security forces were reportedly among those who left their belongings and fled

Hundreds of thousands of people have now left Mosul, and are heading to Kurdistan

Cars carrying Mosul residents caused a giant traffic jam outside the nearby Kurdish city of Irbil

"The army forces threw away their weapons, changed their clothes, abandoned their vehicles and left the city," Mahmud Nuri, a resident fleeing Mosul, told the AFP news agency.

There has been a large number of civilian casualties, the IOM says, and some mosques have been converted into clinics to treat the injured.

Late on Tuesday, ISIS militants were also reported to have taken the nearby town of Baiji, home to Iraq's largest oil refinery, but they now appear to have withdrawn in the face of army and police reinforcements.  BBC