MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

“Our final destination will be Baghdad, the decisive battle will be there” says the jihadist leader. For now, perhaps. But Baghdad will not be the final destination. The final and decisive battle will be over Jerusalem …

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Zechariah 12:2-3, “Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah [and] against Jerusalem. And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.”

The Globe and Mail – “Iraqi Kurds seized control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk on Thursday, while surging Sunni Islamist rebels advanced toward Baghdad, as the central government’s army abandoned its posts in a rapid collapse that has lost it control of the north.

Peshmerga fighters, the security forces of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish north, swept into Kirkuk after the army abandoned its posts there, a peshmerga spokesman said. ‘The whole of Kirkuk has fallen into the hands of peshmerga,’ said Jabbar Yawar. ‘No Iraqi army remains in Kirkuk now.’

Kurds have long dreamed of taking Kirkuk, a city with huge oil reserves just outside their autonomous region, which they regard as their historical capital. The swift move by their highly organized security forces demonstrates how this week’s sudden advance by fighters of the al-Qaeda offshoot Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has redrawn Iraq’s map.

Since Tuesday, black-clad ISIL fighters have seized Iraq’s second biggest city Mosul and Tikrit, hometown of former dictator Saddam Hussein, as well as other towns and cities north of Baghdad. They continued their lightning advance on Thursday, moving into towns just an hour’s drive from the capital.

The army of the Shiite-led government in Baghdad has essentially fled in the face of the onslaught, abandoning buildings and weapons to the fighters who aim to create a strict Sunni Caliphate on both sides of the Iraq-Syria frontier.

Security and police sources said militants now controlled parts of the small town of Udhaim, 90 kilometres north of Baghdad, after most of the army troops left their positions and withdrew toward the nearby town of Khalis.

‘We are waiting for supporting troops and we are determined not to let them take control. We are afraid that terrorists are seeking to cut the main highway that links Baghdad to the north,’ said a police officer in Udhaim.

”Our final destination will be Baghdad, the decisive battle will be there,’ that’s what their leader of the militants group kept repeating,’ a tribal figure from the town of Alam, north of Tikrit, said.” Read more.