Michael Weiss is a columnist for Foreign Policy and NOW Lebanon. He reported from the 2012 siege of Aleppo.

Najim Jabouri’s story is in many ways the story of Iraq. The only difference, perhaps, is the ending. Jabouri, a general in Saddam Hussein’s army, served during the Iraq-Iran war, fought the Americans in the first Gulf War, and then worked alongside them and the new Iraqi army after Saddam’s fall to help quell the insurgency that threatened to destroy the country. In a 2006 speech George W. Bush even praised Jabouri, a Mosul native, as exactly the kind of ally the United States was “proud” to have in Iraq. But Jabouri’s rise to presidential favor had a sad postscript: Two years later, fearing for the safety of himself and his family, Jabouri fled with them to the United States. In 2011, the rest of the U.S. troop contingent also departed Iraq, ending a traumatic eight-year presence that began in hubris— with “shock and awe”—and finished up with a profound sense of humility about the limits of U.S. power.

Now Jabouri is safe while his native country is undergoing slow-motion— and heavily assisted — suicide. Once the civil war is over, Jabouri believes “Iraq will be three states: Shia in the south, Sunni in the west, and Kurdish in the north.” The outcome, in truth, will be far more complicated than that. Jabouri, the former police chief and mayor of Tal Afar, an antique city near what used to be known as—but may not be much longer — Iraq’s border with Syria, says the takeover of Anbar province and then the northern city of Mosul this week by an ultra-extremist group called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has also erased most differences between the national entities known as Syria and Iraq. To demonstrate that this was precisely their goal, ISIS militants even bulldozed flat an earthen berm separating the two countries. Thanks to the blundering, sectarian governance of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who has sought to impose Shiite dominance, Jabouri says, “The Sunnis in Iraq and the Sunnis in Syria are united.”


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Then there are the Kurds, who seem eager to seize this historic opportunity to realize, at long last, their century-old dream of independence and statehood. On Thursday, as ISIS threatened their northern region, Kurdish peshmerga paramilitary forces — believed to be the most effective fighting force in Iraq — marched into Kirkuk and took complete control of that oil-rich city without a firing a shot. Iraqi soldiers had abandoned their positions there, just as they had a few days earlier in Mosul. “A Kurdish state is on the way,” President Massoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Regional Government told Sky News Arabia in April. The occasion then for this forecast was the decision taken by the Kurdish government to ship oil directly to neighboring Turkey, bypassing Baghdad’s authority completely. Erbil, the Kurdish capital, also intends to complete construction of a KRG-Turkish pipeline—the backbone to what could be a major new alliance in the Middle East between Kurdistan and Turkey. Many of the half million refugees now fleeing Mosul are heading to the Kurdish region. And with the Kurds in complete control of Kirkuk, a city they called their “Jerusalem,” it may be that Barzani’s prophecy will be met sooner than even he anticipated.

The breakup of Iraq is something that the United States spent over $2 trillion over the last decade trying to avoid. If it happens, it will prove a devastating legacy for two American presidents, Bush and Barack Obama. It is a fate that has been feared—and foretold – not just for the last ten years but for much of the last hundred, ever since the modern nation-states of the Middle East – mainly Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – were created out of whole cloth by British and French diplomats seeking to reclaim their spheres of influence after World War I. Since then Arab nationalists, left-wing anti-imperialists and Islamic fundamentalists have variously dreamed of erasing the legacy of the so-called Sykes-Picot agreement, under which Mark Sykes, a British MP, and Francois-Georges Picot, a French diplomat, crudely divvied up colonialist spoils from the decaying Ottoman Empire in 1916. Essentially Sykes and Picot drew “a diagonal line in the sand that ran from the Mediterranean Sea coast to the mountains of the Persian frontier,” as British historian James Barr put it. Iraq itself was patched together from regions that had little to do with each other ethnically and culturally, but which various rulers culminating in Saddam Hussein tried to weld into some form of national unity with bloody force.

George W. Bush and the hawks who supported the Iraq war thought they could do better with democracy. That hasn’t worked very well either—and Bush’s successor, Obama, who once called the war “dumb,” has inherited the problem and the bulk of the criticism. Obama’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq completely in 2011 — a decision that both his former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen opposed — now weighs heavily on the cohesion of the keystone state in the Middle East. Maliki, who provoked the U.S. withdrawal when he refused to grant U.S. troops legal immunity, has since pleaded for them to return as the civil war in Syria has spilled over into Iraq. Obama has ignored Maliki for months, eager to leave behind the Iraq experience for good. But during a photo-op Thursday with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the president indicated that ISIS represents a dire enough threat to U.S. interests that he may be reconsidering some U.S. military assistance. “We do have a stake in making sure these jihadists do not gain a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria,” Obama said. White House spokesman Jay Carney said, however, that any aid would not include “boots on the ground.”

As if all this weren’t complicated enough, now neighboring Iran — which for half a decade has been furtively controlling much of the Iraqi government — is getting militarily involved as well. Oddly enough, Tehran may prove to be a potential U.S. ally in the newest fight for Iraq. On Thursday, Iranian security forces told the Wall Street Journal that two of the elite Quds Force battalions of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which had been active in Iraq for years, were now deployed to join the battle against the ISIS extremists. Overseeing this effort is Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, one of the most cunning and deadly intelligence officers in the 21st-century Middle East. These battalions were guarding Baghdad and two Shia-majority cities: Najaf and Karbala. Says Jabouri: “Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq — all these areas belong to Iran now.”And now the IRGC, via Maliki, is inviting U.S. bombardment of ISIS positions in Iraq. The next American war in the Middle East, if it comes, may thus be fought alongside America’s enemy, Iran.

Perhaps the most ominous new development of all is that ISIS militants are pounding at the gates of another major central Iraqi city, Samarra, which despite its Sunni-majority population (it is the birthplace of ISIS’s current commander, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), contains the Al-Askari Mosque, one of the most venerated Shia shrines. Two separate terrorist bombings of this mosque, in 2006 and 2007, damaged its famed golden dome and minarets and touched off terrible sectarian violence. The perpetrators were widely believed to have been al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor of ISIS. “If the mosque is attacked now, then you will have a full-fledged civil war,” says Ahmed Ali, the Iraq Team Lead at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank. Only this time, there won’t be any American or British troops to try and contain it, and it almost certainly won’t be confined to just Iraq.

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The catalyst setting all these dramatic changes in motion is a breakaway jihadist group that is so fierce and brutal it was disowned by al Qaeda in Syria earlier this year. Having taken Fallujah six months ago and seriously contested Ramadi, both in Anbar province, ISIS sacked three additional cities in Iraq: Mosul in Ninevah province, Tikrit and Baji in Salah ad-Din province. The first is the second-largest city in Iraq and the provincial capital of Ninevah; the second is the former birthplace of Saddam Hussein; and the third is home to Iraq’s largest oil refinery. All were major flash-points for the U.S.-led coalition forces’ counterinsurgency operations during the height of the Iraqi civil war in the mid-2000s. And as if to emphasize its spectacular unmaking of a Western-imposed regional order, ISIS posted photographs showing its jihadist fighters bulldozing the border berm under the headline, “Smashing the Sykes-Picot border.”

Open In New Window

According to the Institute for the Study of War, “There is now an Islamic State controlled by an al-Qaeda splinter in the heart of the Middle East” that stretches from the countryside of Aleppo, Syria, to the outskirts of Suwayra, a town south of Baghdad ( map). For the past year ISIS has carefully planned and coordinated its campaign to move into Iraq, calling it “Soldiers’ Harvest,” the ISW says. But even the extremists didn’t think it would be so easy. The Iraqi Security Forces, which the United States spent $14 billion training and arming, have simply melted away. Even before Mosul fell, the Iraqi army was bleeding to death, losing as many as 300 soldiers a day due to desertion, killings and casualties incurred in other areas in Iraq that ISIS had infiltrated or seized, according to one unnamed security analyst working with the Maliki government who spoke to the New York Times.

This week could easily mark the final disintegration of the Iraqi army—and utter chaos in the country. In Mosul, ISIS stormed the Turkish consulate, capturing more than 80 Turkish civilians, diplomats and support staff. The radicals also raided abandoned military installations, including those formerly occupied by U.S. forces such as Mosul International Airport and Camp Ghazlani. The haul was astonishing: U.S.-made Humvees, assault weapons, and rockets, all discarded by fleeing Iraqi forces, were now in the hands of jihadists who are considered more radical than al-Qaeda. ISIS emptied prisons, as it had done Abu Ghraib last July, no doubt to swell its own ranks. And according to reports as much as half a billion dollars may have been seized from the Mosul Central Bank, which could make ISIS the wealthiest terrorist franchise in history.

How did ISIS manage to accomplish so much in a year? Contrary to some media representations, it has had some help in the form of other tenuous Sunni allies, including Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqah al-Naqshabandia , a Ba’ath insurgency that couches its war against Maliki in tribal terms; and Ansar al-Islam, another Sunni Islamist group. The true nature and extent of other actors’ involvement in this conflict has yet to be fully uncovered, but already it seems clear that ISIS is drawing on local support bases. A kind of shadow Awakening is now in evidence, with Sunni tribes, Islamists, and dead-enders of the ancien regime all in league against Iraq’s new Shiite strongman. But what is also clear is that in Syria ISIS has managed to do what other rebel groups have not: effectively if harshly administer municipal facilities, says Pieter Van Ostaeyen, a Belgian analyst of Syrian jihadis. “They run the water supply in Raqqa. They control the dam on the Euphrates River. They do trash collection, run hospitals, and drive their own police cars,” he said. Most important, ISIS attracts fighters from outside of the Levant and Mesopotamia because its propaganda and recruitment efforts are savvy. “The fighters don’t seem to have any restrictions on what they can and can’t do on social media,” Van Ostaeyen says. “OK, they can’t tweet about upcoming operations, obviously, but anything else is fair game. You want to pose with pictures of chopped-off heads? Go ahead. You want to show some guys you just crucified? Go ahead. This outreach appeals to foreign fighters, mostly from northern Africa.” Van Ostaeyen reckons that a good percentage of the militants responsible for sacking Mosul were not native to Syria or Iraq. Already, ISIS has claimed that its stunning seizure of Mosul has been a recruitment bonanza.

ISIS also appears to be drawing on classical “Desert Power” Arab military doctrine that dates back to the 7th century. “The Bedouin army could go out into the Syrian desert and they could strike either the Mediterranean region or the Euphrates valley or what is now Israel-Palestine,” says Col. Joel Rayburn, who served as a strategic analyst for the US military in Iraq. “They could strike at any of the areas on the edge of that desert, as though the desert were an inland sea that they could cross at will. Think of the Jazira [the territory encompassing eastern Syria and western/central Iraq] as the new desert. ISIS can go out there and project Desert Power into the river valleys and settled areas.”

The move into Iraq follows a strategic withdrawal from western and northern Syria as internecine warfare among rebel groups has eclipsed the fight against the Assad regime, according to Michael Nahum, a counterterrorism expert at a private defense firm in Washington. ISIS is now engaged in fierce combat with the Syrian opposition, principally Jabhat al-Nusra — the official al-Qaeda franchise in Syria — and the Islamic Front, a consortium of Salafist brigades, and also with the Syrian-Kurdish militias of the Democratic Union Party. Nahum says that since last January, ISIS has sought to consolidate the border terrain, or badlands, of Syria in the provinces of Hasakah, Raqqa, and Deir Ezzor. The group’s stated goal is to destroy the Sykes-Picot borders and form an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. These provinces are not only where Syria’s own oil fields reside, but they are ISIS’s portals into and out of Iraq. A retrenchment has thus commenced, with the group “abandoning whole provinces in Latakia, Idlib, and their token presence in Damascus,” Nahum said. ISIS’s presence in Aleppo is now mainly confined to towns on the outskirts of the provincial capital city. Raqqa, meanwhile, ISIS’s military training ground, is its West Point, and Mosul is intended to be its longed-for, and now captured, capital city.

It does not appear ISIS can be defeated any time soon, at least not by the current regimes in Damascus and Baghdad alone. Iran’s involvement, meanwhile, remains a wild card. In addition to the Revolutionary Guard, Iran has employed an array of well-trained sectarian proxy groups that have already been called into action to defend Shia interests and holy sites in Iraq. Phillip Smyth, a researcher at the University of Maryland who tracks the activities of various Shia militia groups, says that many of these militias — originally deployed to Syria — began returning to Iraq in February or March in response to ISIS’s gains in Anbar. Even disbanded homegrown militias are looking to return to the fore. Already, Iraqi Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has threatened to reconstitute the Mahdi Army, a once formidable enemy of U.S. forces, which expended enormous blood and treasure fighting it in Najaf. ISIS has roused old demons, but the conditions for exorcism have changed dramatically given the absence of American power. “The Shia, whether they like it or not, are now under Iran’s umbrella,” Smyth says.

There have been innumerable predictions of the demise of Sykes-Picot in its century-long history: Nasserism, Ba’athism, the Muslim Brotherhood to name but a few examples. But this time may be different. First, ISIS’s black flag flies across 575 miles of territory at a time when the United States has chosen to absent itself in any meaningful way from the Middle East. Second, the only opposing forces to ISIS at present are a loose collection of troops that are mostly at odds with one another (like the Kurds, Shiite Iraqis and Iranians). Third, the sort of jihadism that this grim terrorist army espouses isn’t open to engagement with the West. And finally, its strategic triumph is occurring at a major historical crisis point in the history of Sunni-Shia relations, amid a three year-old civil war in Syria that has exacerbated regional sectarianism. This, too, should give pause to those who believe that the borders of the Levant and Mesopotamia are immutable, or that what we now call Syria and Iraq are destined to survive.