Al-Qaida-inspired militants who seized large swaths of Iraq’s Sunni heartland this week have pushed into an ethnically mixed province northeast of Baghdad, capturing two towns there, officials said Friday. The fresh gains by the fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant come as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-led government struggles to form a coherent response after the Sunni militants blitzed and captured the country’s second-largest city of Mosul as well as other, smaller communities and military and police bases – often after meeting little resistance from state security forces. The new reality is the biggest threat to Iraq’s stability since the U.S. withdrawal at the end of 2011, and it has pushed the nation closer to a precipice that could partition it into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish zones. Police officials said militants driving in machinegun-mounted pickups entered two towns in Diyala province late […]