Iraq crisis: Shia volunteers confront Sunni insurgents in Samarra

Thousands of Shia fighters have rushed to the central Iraqi city of Samarra to defend two shrines that were blown up by insurgents eight years ago, triggering the sectarian war that almost destroyed the country, the Guardian reports. 

Convoys of fighters were seen being escorted north by Iraqi police trucks from Baghdad early on Friday and many have now reached the city where insurgents – led by the Sunni militant group the Islamic State of Iraq in the Levant (Isis) – were in control after a lightning strike south.

The volunteer Shia fighters were quickly assembled after Iraqi forces abandoned their positions in most of the area, leaving only a small number of troops to guard the Imam al-Askari shrines.

Samarra is the fourth northern city to have all but fallen out of government control. The embattled prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, appears to have drawn battle lines further south in Taiji, hoping to defend Baghdad against insurgents who have occupied the north virtually unopposed.

The UN human rights spokesman, Rupert Colville, said on Friday that hundreds of people were killed, many of them summarily executed, after Isis overran Mosul on Tuesday.

"We've received reports of the summary execution of Iraqi army soldiers during the capture of Mosul and of 17 civilians in one particular street," Colville said, citing the UN mission to Iraq. "There was also the execution of a court employee in the Dawasa area in central Mosul and the execution of 12 people in Dawasa who were believed to have been serving with the Iraq security services or possibly with members of the police."

He said the UN mission had interviewed some of the 500,000 who fled Mosul. A further 40,000 people are were estimated to have fled Tikrit and Samara, according to the International Organisation for Migration.