Iraq Unrest Threatens To Redraw Middle East
Updated: 2:17pm UK, Tuesday 10 June 2014
By Tim Marshall, Diplomatic Editor
Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, is now under the control of radical Islamist fighters ideologically aligned with al Qaeda, bringing closer the possibility that the country will fall apart.
The violence is also further proof that the conflicts in Syria and Iraq have merged and threaten further instability throughout the region.
Fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) overran a military base, causing the Iraqi army to retreat.
Before they left, soldiers destroyed equipment and ammunition to prevent it from falling into ISIL's hands.
Government buildings, TV stations, police headquarters, and checkpoints are all said to be controlled by ISIL.
Twenty-eight Turkish lorry drivers are reported to have been taken hostage and at least 1,000 prisoners have been freed, many of them ISIL members, with many civilians forced to flee the city.
Most of Nineveh province in now in the hands of the militants, as are large swathes of territory in eastern Syria along the Iraqi border.
There is fighting in four other Iraqi provinces.
The government in Baghdad considers the situation a national emergency.
Ministers have called on the Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq to help, but authorities in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region appear reluctant to become involved.
ISIL wants to create a Sunni Islamic caliphate out of Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.
Given the strength of the Shia populations in the area, who are backed by Iran, that does not look realistic.
However, the fighting does threaten to redraw the current map of the region, which was carved up between France and Britain under the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916.
Before the imperial powers drew what were in many cases artificial borders, few people regarded themselves as belonging to a nation state such as Iraq or Syria, instead they identified with tribe and religion.
With the nation states now under threat people are retreating further into those identities.
ISIL is 100% Sunni Muslim and mostly Arabic; the Iraqi Government is dominated by the Shia; and the Sunni Kurds are increasingly trying to isolate themselves from the rest of Iraq.
Syria has collapsed into a civil war fought essentially along sectarian lines.
Those identities also cross borders with many of the Kurds identifying far more with their ethnic kin in Turkey, Syria, and Iran.
Many of Iraq's Sunni's have tribal links stretching into Syria.
If the violence worsens (currently about 200 people a day in the region die violently), the death toll will grow and the oil industry in Iraq will be seriously threatened.
A victory for ISIL would also embolden and strengthen similar movements in other parts of the Middle East.
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