CAIRO (AP) — It has been a week of stunning advances by Islamic militants across a belt from Iraq to Pakistan. In Iraq, jihadi fighters rampaged through the country’s second-largest city and swept farther south in their drive to establish an extremist enclave stretching into Syria. Pakistan’s largest airport was paralyzed and rocked by explosions as gunmen stormed it in a dramatic show of strength.

More than a decade after the U.S. launched its “war on terrorism,” Islamic militant groups are bolder than ever, exploiting the erosion or collapse of central government control in a string of nations — Syria, Iraq and Pakistan — that are more strategically vital than the relatively failed states where al-Qaida set up its bases in the past: Somalia, Yemen and 1990s Afghanistan.