LibriumArcana.Games

Out of the crucible of the Syrian civil war and the discontent in Iraq’s Sunni regions, something new is emerging. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is no longer a state in name only.* It is a physical, if extra-legal, reality on the ground. Unacknowledged by the world community, ISIS has carved a de facto state in the borderlands of Syria and Iraq. Stretching in a long ellipse roughly from al-Raqqah in Syria to Fallujah in Iraq (with many other non-contiguous “islands” of control in both Iraq and Syria), this former Al Qaeda affiliate holds territory, provides limited services, dispenses a form of justice (loosely defined), most definitely has an army, and flies its own flag. The United States has reacted to this reality indecisively, with policy split in half by the official, if no longer functional, internationally recognized border between Syria and Iraq. But the reality of a de facto jihadist state is not a state of affairs that can be long tolerated.

This is an interesting evolution for ISIS. ISIS is, of course, the linear descendant of the Islamic State of Iraq, which was formed in the immediate aftermath of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death and is now led by Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi. In 2006, the Islamic State of Iraq published a veritable “Federalist Papers,” titled “Informing the People about the Islamic State of Iraq.” In this document, the author, Uthman Bin Abd al-Rahman al-Tamimi, claims that the state existed despite having no contiguous territory, despite providing minimal services (“Improving their [the people’s] conditions is less important than the condition of their religion”), and despite not having a monopoly on the legitimate use of armed force—the traditional sine qua non of a state.

Al-Tamimi claimed that instead the Islamic State of Iraq was based around pseudo-feudal alliances, “pure” ideological goals, and judicial proceedings. This was a controversial position, even and especially within the jihadi movement. Foreshadowing the conflict between ISIS and Al Qaeda today, the jihadi community was deeply divided over the legitimacy and wisdom of declaring a state, not least because of confusion over whether a “state” would be accountable to Al Qaeda’s central leaders or vice versa. Drawing mostly on the Prophet Muhammad’s experience in Medina, al-Tamimi argued—primarily to a jihadi audience—that despite the jihadi state’s tangible weaknesses, it was legitimate.

The ISI was a significant entity for jihadis starting in 2006. But from a Western perspective, while al-Tamimi’s arguments were interesting, they were not particularly meaningful. It was never taken seriously other than as the nominal political wing of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Despite its internal philosophical justification, the Islamic State never held significant amounts of territory, and what little they did control was not contiguous. Further, from 2006-2008, Al Qaeda in Iraq was dangerous, but did not resemble an army. They were accomplished terrorists, spies, saboteurs, and murderers, but seldom fought as organized units using traditional military tactics. Especially after the U.S. Surge and Awakening movement defeated the ISI tactically and effectively suppressed the group, the Islamic State of Iraq’s lasting impact on the wider jihadi movement barely registered a ripple as a priority for Western policymakers.

When we fast forward to 2014, ISIS—the Islamic State of Iraq’s descendant—has taken a very different form. Without disavowing its founding documents, ISIS controls territory on a grand scale, and appears far more capable of securing it. In Syria, ISIS greatly overshadows its rival group the Al-Nusrah front, the official Al Qaeda franchise that also allies with the Free Syrian Army. And, ironically, Iraq is now without an official Al Qaeda branch, with ISIS’ only real competitors coming from the neo-Baathist JRTN and the more nationalist 1920 Revolutionary Brigade.

At its core, the most fundamental difference between Islamic State of Iraq and ISIS today is power: ISIS has a real army (indeed, as once said about the Prussians, it may be less a state with an army than an army with a state) and contains a much more robust capability to defend and expand its territory in both Iraq and Syria. Before beginning its open offensive in Anbar province in Iraq, ISIS had been fighting against the forces of the Assad regime in Syria (and their Hezbollah/Qods Force auxiliaries). It is obvious from the very sophisticated tactics displayed against the Iraqi security forces this year that ISIS learned a great deal from this traditional, if dispersed, urban combat. U.S. government officials have testified that ISIS is now equipped with heavy machine guns, anti-aircraft weapons, and .50 caliber sniper rifles. From their safe havens inside their de facto state, ISIS cadres are able to continue to recruit, train and equip their highly motivated volunteers, and push them against both the Baathist Assad regime in Syria and the elected Shi’a majority government in Iraq (where, in both cases, they also often work and fight alongside more indigenous jihadist groups).

While we have little sympathy for the Assad regime and recognize the shortcomings of the Iraqi government, the Iraqi state in which the U.S. government has invested vast resources is gravely threatened—in terms of stability, not their imminent overthrow—by the ISIS army, which seeks to further expand its territory. However, aside from U.S. interests in Iraq, there are at least three further issues generated by the de facto ISIS state.

First, ISIS’ expansion and rejection of Al Qaeda’s central leadership represents a new evolution in jihadi extremism. The near-extinction of Al Qaeda’s core—the organization constructed by Osama bin Laden and now led by Ayman al-Zawahiri—has created space for new and more extreme forms of jihadi militancy. In 1999, Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi challenged Osama bin Laden’s ideological direction because he considered Al Qaeda too accommodating to Shia Muslims. Fifteen years later, Zarqawi’s ideological and organizational descendants have the power to confront Al Qaeda’s leadership more thoroughly. At the core of Zarqawi’s ideology were two ideas: that commanders close to battle had ultimate political authority and that purity in the movement was paramount. In its interaction with Al Qaeda, ISIS embodies both ideas and, not surprisingly, has quite famously been expelled from Al Qaeda, ostensibly for insubordination, but perhaps also for acting like the sovereign state that is has de facto become.

Second, the existence of ISIS as a de facto state presents an incredible challenge in terms of safe haven for terrorists with transnational ambitions. While ISIS remains focused on immediate and local threats at present, it has made no secret of its longer term ambitions to strike against the United States and Europe. Its predecessors struck outside of Iraq more often than commonly acknowledged. ISIS is said to have at least hundreds of members carrying EU passports, both second and third generation children of immigrants from Islamic countries and also native European converts (see reports by the London-based ICSR on Western foreign fighters in Syria). ISIS has created a multi-ethnic army; almost a foreign legion, to secure its territory. These cadres—trained, indoctrinated, networked, equipped and funded—will doubtless present a challenge for Arab and Western security services in the coming years, all the more so if not dealt with in the very near future.

Finally, this new reality presents a challenge that rises above a mere counter-terrorism problem. ISIS no longer exists in small cells that can be neutralized by missiles or small groups of commandos. It is now a real, if nascent and unrecognized, state actor—more akin in organization and power to the Taliban of the late 1990s than Al Qaeda. Unless ISIS collapses on itself, which is a long tradition in jihadi circles but looks increasingly unlikely, neutralization of the group will require significant ground combat by someone, with the support of airpower. Such an outcome is increasingly likely as the flow of funds and recruits to ISIS continues despite conflict with Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria. To date, the geographic location of ISIS and the reticence of Western governments to be involved in the nominal territory of either Iraq or Syria (though for very different reasons for each), coupled with the weakness of both the Iraqi and Syrian armies (and the latter fighting against numerous opponents of varying alliance with the West), has prevented an effective challenge to ISIS.

And yet ISIS presents a clear and present danger to American and European interests. The group does not have safe haven within a state. It is a de facto state that is a safe haven. Arguably, ISIS presents an even more vibrant incubator for international terrorism than did pre-9/11 Afghanistan. It would be the greatest of historical ironies if just at the moment when the operation in Afghanistan to banish Al Qaeda safe havens is concluded, an even more dangerous sanctuary emerges in the deserts between Baghdad and Damascus.


* ISIS is also known as ISIL, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, and is also referred to by its Arabic acronym, DAASH—all are equivalent terms for the same organization.

Iraq's prime minister has asked parliament to declare a state of emergency after Islamist militants effectively took control of Mosul and much of its province of Nineveh.

Nouri Maliki said "vital areas" of the city had been seized; some 150,000 people are believed to have fled.

Troops fled Mosul as hundreds of jihadists from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) overran it.

The US has said ISIS threatens not just Iraq, but the entire region.

State department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the situation in Mosul, Iraq's second city, was "extremely serious" and that the US supported "a strong, co-ordinated response to push back against this aggression".

Security sources also told the BBC on Tuesday that fierce fighting had erupted between Iraqi forces and ISIS fighters in a town called Rashad near Kirkuk, south-east of Mosul.

In a televised announced, Mr Maliki said that security forces had been placed on a state of "maximum alert".

He also said he had asked parliament to declare a state of emergency - which would broaden arrest powers and allow curfews to be imposed - and a "general mobilisation" of civilians.

line
Analysis: Jim Muir, BBC News, Beirut

Nouri Maliki, who is struggling to form a government in the wake of the April elections, has vowed to drive the ISIS "terrorists" out of mainly-Sunni Mosul in short order.

He is unlikely to succeed soon. He made similar vows when Sunni militants took over Falluja, west of Baghdad, in January, and they are still there.

It is not yet clear whether it is only ISIS involved in the Mosul takeover. In Falluja and its province, Anbar, Mr Maliki has clearly alienated many Sunni tribesmen and others, creating fertile soil for the radicals.

Internet images of local youths and even children stoning Iraqi security vehicles as they fled Mosul suggest that the Shia PM is not popular there either.

ISIS is also actively fighting in neighbouring eastern Syria to establish its control there, apparently aiming to straddle the border with an Islamic state.

If Mr Maliki is to defeat the Sunni radicals, he may need the help of Kurdish forces from the north. That will come with a heavy price tag, and they have in any case so far refused.

ISIS has been informally controlling much of Nineveh province for months and the past week has attacked cities and towns in western and northern Iraq, killing scores of people.

After five days of fighting, they took control of key installations in Mosul, which has a population of about 1.8 million.

On Tuesday, residents said jihadist flags were flying from buildings and that the militants had announced over loudspeakers they had "come to liberate Mosul".

"The situation is chaotic inside the city and there is nobody to help us," said government worker Umm Karam. "We are afraid."

Many police stations were reported to have been set on fire and hundreds of detainees set free.

Screengrab of video purportedly showing Mosul following takeover of Mosul on 10 June 2014
Video footage from Mosul shows ISIS militants driving through the streets and vehicles on fire
Iraq security forces move towards Mosul on 8 June 2014
Reinforcements deployed to Mosul by the Iraqi military have failed to halt the militants' advance
Iraqi parliament speaker Osama al-Nujaifi told journalists in Baghdad that "all of Nineveh province" had fallen to the militants who were now heading south towards Salaheddin province.

He called on the Iraqi government and Kurdistan Regional Government to send reinforcements.

Sources have told BBC Arabic that the tens of thousands of fleeing refugees are heading to three towns in the nearby region of Kurdistan where authorities have set up temporary camps for them.

Kurdistan Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani issued a statement appealing to the UN refugee agency for help.

Map



The Iraqi government is struggling with a surge in sectarian violence that killed almost 800 people, including 603 civilians, in May alone, according to the UN. Last year, more than 8,860 people died.

Parts of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and much of the nearby city of Falluja have been under the control of ISIS and its allies since late December, something that Mr Maliki has been unable to reverse.

Also on Tuesday, the Turkish consulate in Mosul confirmed reports that 28 Turkish lorry drivers had been abducted by militants in Nineveh.

Elsewhere, a double bomb attack targeting a funeral procession in the central town of Baqouba killed at least 20 people, police said.

Islamist insurgents in Iraq have seized the city of Tikrit, their second major gain after capturing Mosul on Tuesday, security officials say.

Tikrit, the hometown of former leader Saddam Hussein, lies 150km (95 miles) north of the capital Baghdad.

Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki vowed to fight back against the jihadists and punish those in the security forces who fled offering little or no resistance.

The insurgents are from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).

ISIS, which is also known as ISIL, is an offshoot of al-Qaeda.


Paul Wood reports from a Kurdish checkpoint north of Mosul
It controls considerable territory in eastern Syria and western and central Iraq, in a campaign to set up a Sunni militant enclave straddling the border.

There were also reports on Wednesday of fighting further south, in Samarra, 110km north of Baghdad.

Separately, at least 21 people were killed and 45 hurt by a suicide bomber at a Shia meeting in Baghdad, police said.

'Do not give in'
As many as 500,000 people fled Mosul after the militants attacked the city. The head of the Turkish mission in Mosul and almost 50 consulate staff are being held by the militants, Turkish officials say.

Turkey's foreign minister warned there would be "harsh retaliation" if any of its citizens were harmed.



There were heavy clashes reported in Tikrit, with dozens of insurgents attacking security forces near the headquarters of the Salaheddin provincial government in the city centre.

One eyewitness told the BBC that gunmen had entered the city from four different directions and a police station had been set on fire.

AFP news agency quoted police and witnesses as saying there was fighting at the northern entrance to Samarra.

Earlier Mr Maliki vowed to fight back against the militants. He has asked parliament to declare a state of emergency.

In a live TV address, he said a "conspiracy" had taken place in Mosul and surrounding Nineveh province.

Mr Maliki said he did not want to apportion blame for who had ordered the security personnel "to retreat and cause chaos".

He added: "Those who deserted and did not carry out their jobs properly should be punished."

Mr Maliki told the people of Nineveh: "Do not give in. We are with you, the state is with you, the army is with you. Even if the battle is a long one, we will not let you down."
He pledged to "reorganise the armed forces to cleanse Nineveh of the terrorists".

The BBC's Jim Muir says people in Mosul are reporting that militants there have been travelling around the city telling them they are not in danger - even the Shia residents - and that people should go back to work.

ISIS has been informally controlling much of Nineveh for months, and in the past week has attacked other areas of western and northern Iraq, killing scores of people.

PM Nouri Maliki blamed the fall of Mosul on a conspiracy
The US has condemned the militants, but BBC world affairs correspondent Paul Adams says the West's response is not going to be military, as there is no appetite to return to a battleground that claimed thousands of British and American lives.

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said there was "no question" of British troops returning to Iraq, five years after they ended combat operations there.

He said that the Iraqi government had "considerable resources" and it was up to its armed forces to respond.

The Iraqi government is struggling with a surge in sectarian violence that killed almost 800 people, including 603 civilians, in May alone, according to the UN. Last year, more than 8,860 people died.

ISIS in Iraq
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has 3,000 to 5,000 fighters, and grew out of an al-Qaeda-linked organisation in Iraq

ISIS has exploited the standoff between the Iraqi government and the minority Sunni Arab community, which complains that Shia PM Nouri Maliki is monopolising power

It has already taken over Ramadi and Falluja, but taking over Mosul is a far greater feat than anything the movement has achieved so far, and will send shockwaves throughout the region

The organisation is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - an obscure figure regarded as a battlefield commander and tactician. He was once the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, one of the groups that later became ISIS.

Iraq’s fracturing deepened on Thursday as Kurdish forces poured into the strategic northern oil city of Kirkuk after government troops fled, while emboldened Sunni militants who seized two other important northern cities this week moved closer to Baghdad and issued threats about advancing into the heavily Shiite south and destroying the shrines there, the holiest in Shiism.

The rapidly unfolding developments came as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s entreaties for emergency powers stalled because of inaction by Parliament, which seemed paralyzed over the worst crisis to confront the country since it was convulsed by sectarian mayhem at the height of the American-led invasion nearly a decade ago. The inability or unwillingness of Mr. Maliki’s armed forces to hold their ground only compounded the crisis.

The American government’s apparent rejection of Mr. Maliki’s requests for airstrikes on the Sunni militants reflected a deep reluctance by the Obama administration to re-entangle the United States militarily in Iraq, where the last American forces withdrew more than two years ago after a divisive war that cost the United States nearly 4,500 military lives and more than $1 trillion.

But President Obama, offering his first detailed comments on the Iraq crisis, told reporters at the White House on Thursday that his national security advisers were examining “all options” on how to stop the Sunni militant advances in Iraq and that the Iraqi government would need help. “I don’t rule out anything,” he said during an appearance with the visiting Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott.

There were unconfirmed reports that Iran, an ally of Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-led government, had sent Revolutionary Guards into Iraq to help him fight the Sunni militants. The Times of London, in its account, said the Iranians included a 150-member unit of the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force. Iran’s state-run press reported earlier this week that the country had strengthened its forces along the Iraq border and suspended all pilgrim visas into Iraq.

Kurdish officials said on Thursday that their forces had taken full control of Kirkuk in northern Iraq as government troops abandoned their posts there. “The army disappeared,” said Najmaldin Karim, the governor of Kirkuk.

Militants aligned with the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria swept across the porous border from Syria on Tuesday to overrun Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. They have been driving toward the capital since then, capturing the town of Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, seizing parts of the oil refinery city of Baiji and threatening Samarra, a city sacred to Shiites just 70 miles north of Baghdad.

Unlike the Iraqi national army, the Kurdish forces, known as pesh merga, are disciplined and very loyal to their leaders and their cause: autonomy and eventual independence for a Kurdish state. The Kurds’ allegiance to the Shiite Arab-led Iraqi central government is limited, but neither are they known to be allied with the Sunni Arab militants. Many of the tens of thousands of Mosul residents who fled the militant takeover of the city have sought safety in Kurdish-controlled areas.

With its oil riches, Kirkuk has long been at the center of a political and economic dispute between Kurds and successive Arab governments in Baghdad. The disappearance of the Iraqi army from the city on Thursday appeared to leave Kirkuk’s fate in the Kurds’ hands.

Some Kurdish politicians quickly sought to take advantage, arguing that it was a moment to permanently seize control of Kirkuk and surrounding lands they have long regarded as part of a Kurdish national homeland.

“I hope that the Kurdish leadership will not miss this golden opportunity to bring Kurdish lands in the disputed territories back under Kurdish control,” Shoresh Haji, a Kurdish member of Iraq’s Parliament, was quoted as saying by Al Jazeera. “It is a very sad situation for Mosul, but at the same time, history has presented us with only one or two other moments at which we could regain our territory, and this is an opportunity we cannot ignore.”

On Wednesday, Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, himself a Kurd, was quoted as saying that the Kurdish minority would “work together” with Baghdad’s forces to “flush out these foreign fighters,” but there were no reports of significant clashes between pesh merga forces and the militants.

At a meeting of Arab and European foreign ministers in Athens, Mr. Zebari called the insurgents’ capture of Mosul and other cities “a serious, mortal threat,” and he added: “The response has to be soon. There has to be a quick response to what has happened.”

The urgency was underscored on Thursday when an insurgent spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, exhorted the militants to advance on the Iraqi capital and press on to the southern Iraqi Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, news reports said.

The Associated Press quoted him as urging his followers to march toward Baghdad because they “have an account to settle,” in a recording posted on militant websites commonly used by the group. The authenticity of the recording could not be independently verified.

The spokesman was also quoted as saying that a high-ranking insurgent commander known variously as Adnan Ismail Najm or Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Bilawi al-Anbari had died in the insurgent offensive. According to Mr. Adnani, the commander had worked closely with the Jordanian-born former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by American troops in 2006.

The commander was detained for several years but was released two years ago, enabling him to prepare and command the operations that led up to the newest incursion, The A.P. said.

Parliamentary leaders in Baghdad called a special session of the legislature on Thursday to debate the imposition of a state of emergency that would give Prime Maliki wide powers to restrict citizens’ movements, impose curfews and censor the media. But by early afternoon it appeared the body would not have the quorum needed to pass the emergency decree. A senior government official told Agence France-Presse that only 128 of 325 members of Parliament attended the session, far short of the number needed for a formal vote.

Iraqi officials also said that the government was trying to deploy special forces, backed by Shiite volunteers, to the north of the country in a counteroffensive against the militants.

The militant commanders are said to include Baathist military officers from the Saddam Hussein era, including Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a former vice president and one of the few prominent Baathists to evade capture during the American-led occupation. Mr. al-Douri took time out Thursday afternoon to visit the former dictator’s grave in the town of Awja, about three miles from Tikrit, a militant leader said.

After overrunning Mosul and Tikrit, the insurgents poured down the main north-south highway to reach Samarra.

The city is home to a sacred Shiite shrine that was bombed in 2006 during the American-led occupation, igniting a sectarian civil war between the Sunni minority and the Shiite majority. On the way, the insurgents were said to have taken positions in parts of the important refining town of Baiji, north of Tikrit, but there were conflicting accounts on Thursday as to who was in control there and whether the refinery was operating.

In Samarra on Thursday, witnesses said, militants who had been reinforced overnight by three columns of fighters in scores of vehicles were deployed in positions three miles east and north of the city. Other insurgents had pressed south to take the town of Dhuluiyah, closer to Baghdad, while two predominantly Shiite towns in the region, Balad and Dujail, remained in Shiite hands as forward bases for attempts to halt the insurgents.

At the same time, in what seemed to have the makings of a perilous standoff, battle-hardened Assaib and Kataibe Shiite militias that once fought the Americans had reached Samarra to reinforce pro-government forces there. Government troops who abandoned their posts further north had been ordered to report to the Taji military base, just north of Baghdad to regroup, officials said.

A senior militant commander said that, in Dhuluiyah, insurgents overran an air force base. It was not clear whether aircraft had been stationed at the base. The insurgents were also said to have captured an air force college, taking hundreds of prisoners among Shiites but allowing Sunni personnel and students to leave.

The swift capture of Mosul by militants crossing the border from Syria has underscored how the conflicts in Syria and Iraq have fused into a widening regional insurgency that jihadist militants have cast as the precursor to establishing an Islamic caliphate.

Describing the government’s response to the insurgency, officials speaking on the condition of anonymity said on Thursday that special forces and volunteers would be deployed to the north while security forces closer to the seat of government cracked down on cells of insurgent sympathizers around Baghdad.

For much of their initial advance, the insurgents have met scant resistance, with government forces shedding their uniforms, handing over weapons and equipment and abandoning checkpoints.

Separately, 49 Turkish citizens who were taken hostage after militants stormed the Turkish consulate in Mosul on Wednesday were reported to be in good health and are expected to be released soon, a consulate employee told Turkish media.

The employee, an Iraqi who was not in the building at the time of the raid, said he had reached fellow workers by phone. He said they had told him that consular staff members, including the consul general, had not been harmed.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki broadcast a joint appeal for national unity on Tuesday with bitter Sunni critics of his Shi'ite-led government - a move that may help him win U.S. help against rampant Islamists threatening Baghdad.

Just hours after Maliki's Shi'ite allies had angrily vowed to boycott any cooperation with the biggest Sunni party and his government had accused Sunni neighbor Saudi Arabia of backing "genocide", the premier's visibly uncomfortable televised appearance may reflect U.S. impatience with its Baghdad protege.

In a rerun of previous failed efforts at bridging sectarian and ethnic divisions, Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders met behind closed doors and then stood frostily before cameras as Maliki's Shi'ite predecessor Ibrahim al-Jaafari read a statement denouncing "terrorist powers" and supporting Iraqi sovereignty.

U.S. President Barack Obama is considering military options to push back al Qaeda splinter group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which has swept the Sunni north of the country over the past week as the Shi'ite-led army has crumbled.

But in return Washington want Maliki to do more to address the widespread sense of political exclusion among minority Sunnis which ISIL has exploited to win support among tribal leaders and former followers of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.

View galleryIraqi security forces fire artillery during clashes …
Iraqi security forces fire artillery during clashes with Sunni militant group Islamic State of Iraq …
"No terrorist powers represent any sect or religion," Jaafari said in the address, which included a broad promise of "reviewing the previous course" of Iraqi politics. Afterwards, most of the leaders, including Maliki and Usama al-Nujaifi, the leading Sunni present, walked away from each other in silence.

Earlier, Maliki's government accused Saudi Arabia, the main Sunni power, of backing ISIL - something Riyadh denies.

"We hold them responsible for supporting these groups financially and morally and for its outcome - which includes crimes that may qualify as genocide: the spilling of Iraqi blood, the destruction of Iraqi state institutions and historic and religious sites," a government statement said.

Maliki has blamed Saudi Arabia for supporting militants in the past, but the language was unprecedented. On Monday, Riyadh blamed sectarianism in Baghdad for fuelling the violence.

Maliki, who has been buoyed by a call by Iraq’s senior Shi’ite cleric for citizens to rally to the armed forces, dismissed four generals for abandoning the big northern city of Mosul a week ago and said they would face court martial.

View galleryVolunteers, who have joined the Iraqi Army to fight …
Volunteers, who have joined the Iraqi Army to fight against predominantly Sunni militants from the r …
BAQUBA BATTLE

Scores were killed on Tuesday in a battle for another provincial capital, close to Baghdad, and fighting shut Iraq's biggest refinery at Baiji, hitting fuel and power supplies.

Government forces said they repelled an overnight attempt by insurgents to seize Baquba, capital of Diyala. Some residents and officials said scores of prisoners from the local jail were killed. There were conflicting accounts of how they had died.

ISIL fighters who aim to build a Muslim caliphate across the Iraqi-Syrian frontier launched their revolt by seizing Mosul and swept through the Tigris valley towards Baghdad.

The fighters, who consider all Shi'ites to be heretics deserving death, pride themselves on their brutality and have boasted of massacring hundreds of troops who surrendered.

View galleryMembers of Kurdish security forces take part in intensive …
Members of the Kurdish security forces take part in an intensive security deployment in the outskirt …
Western countries, including the United States, have urged Maliki to reach out to Sunnis to rebuild national unity as the only way of preventing the disintegration of Iraq.

"There is a real risk of further sectarian violence on a massive scale, within Iraq and beyond its borders," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. "I have been urging Iraqi government leaders including Prime Minister al-Maliki to reach out for an inclusive dialogue and solution of this issue."

But the prime minister, in power for eight years and effective winner of a parliamentary election two months ago, seems instead to be relying more heavily than ever on his own sect, who form a majority long oppressed under Saddam.

Though the joint statement late on Tuesday said only those directly employed by the Iraqi state should bear arms, thousands of Shi'ite militiamen have been mobilized to defend Baghdad.

SCRAMBLING ALLIANCES

View galleryTribal fighters and members of Iraqi security forces …
Tribal fighters and members of Iraqi security forces carry their weapons as they take part in an int …
The sudden advance by Sunni insurgents has the potential to scramble alliances in the Middle East, with the United States and Iran both saying they could cooperate against a common enemy, all but unprecedented since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Iran, the leading Shi'ite power, has close ties to Maliki and the Shi'ite parties that have won elections since U.S. forces toppled Saddam in 2003. Although both Washington and Tehran are allies of Baghdad, they have not cooperated in the past but diplomats discussed Iraq briefly on Monday in Vienna.

Obama, under fire at home by critics who say he did too little to shore up Iraq since withdrawing U.S. troops in 2011, is considering options including air strikes. He has sent a small number of extra marines to guard the U.S. embassy but has ruled out redeploying troops following their 2011 withdrawal.

Obama has invited Congressional leaders to talks at the White House on Wednesday as he considers his options in Iraq.

Iraqi officials confirmed that the Baiji refinery north of Baghdad had shut down, although they said government troops still held the vast compound. Foreign workers were evacuated by Iraqi government helicopters.

View galleryTribal fighters and members of Iraqi security forces …
Tribal fighters and members of Iraqi security forces carry their weapons as they take part in an int …
With the refinery shut, Iraq will have difficulty generating electricity and pumping water to sustain its cities in summer. There were already reports of queues for fuel in the north. One official with the Iraqi oil ministry said that northern and western Iraq would be hardest hit, while Baghdad would be less affected due to a refinery on its southern edge.

During the U.S. occupation, the refinery stayed open, and the threat to it shows how much more vulnerable Iraq is now to insurgents than it was before Washington pulled out troops.

Tens of thousands of Shi'ites have rallied at volunteer centers in recent days, answering a call by the top Shi'ite cleric to defend the nation. Many recruits are now in training.

But with the million-strong regular army abandoning ground despite being armed and trained by the United States at a cost of $25 billion, the government is increasingly relying for its own preservation on various Shi'ite militias, many of which operated during the death squad bloodletting of 2006-07.

According to one Shi'ite Islamist working in the government, well-trained organizations Asaib Ahl Haq, Khataeb Hezbollah and the Badr Organization are now being deployed alongside Iraqi military units as the main combat force.

View galleryMembers of Kurdish security forces travel in a vehicle …
Members of Kurdish security forces travel in a vehicle during clashes with Sunni militant group Isla …
CAPITAL BOMBED

Baghdad is on edge. Sunnis worry about convoys of civilian cars with bearded men in military uniform they assume are militiamen, while Shi’ites living in Sunni districts, are moving away, worried that a new round of civil war is unfolding.

Two attacks hit Shi'ite markets in Baghdad Tuesday, a suicide bomber and a car bomb. The two attacks left 18 dead and 52 wounded, according to medical and security sources.

The Sunni militants have moved at lightning speed, slicing through northern and central Iraq, capturing the towns of Hawija and Tikrit in the north before facing resistance in southern Salahaddin province, where there is a large Shi’ite population.

The battle lines are now formalizing, with the insurgents held at bay about an hour's drive north of Baghdad and just on the capital's outskirts to the west, beyond the airport.

Members of the Kurdish security forces take part in an intensive security deployment in the outskirt …
Militants also attacked a town near the northern oil hub of Kirkuk that is inhabited by Shi'ite ethnic Turkmen. The fighting went back and forth and appeared a preview of the challenges the Kurds now facing having rolled into Kirkuk last week after the Iraqi army abandoned positions. A local official from said 5,000 Turkmen had fled. By nightfall, ethnic Kurdish fighters had cleared most of the town but militants still held some ground.

In a further sign of ethnic and sectarian polarization, Maliki allies have accused the Kurds of colluding with Sunnis to dislodge government forces in the north.

The mainly Turkmen city of Tal Afar, west of Mosul, fell to Sunni militants on Sunday, and the Iraqi military said it was sending reinforcements. The army said it killed a top militant named Abu Abdul Rahman al-Muhajir in clashes in Mosul.

But security officials seemed pessimistic. One warned: "There is no clear strategy for the Iraqi government to retake Mosul. And without the U.S. and international community support, the Iraqi government will never retake Mosul."

In a statement that could have a dramatic impact on regional politics in the Middle East, a spokesman for Turkey's ruling party recently told a Kurdish media outlet that the Kurds in Iraq have the right to self-determination. The statement has been relatively overlooked so far, but could signal a shift in policy as Turkey has long been a principal opponent of Kurdish independence, which would mean a partitioning of Iraq.

"The Kurds of Iraq can decide for themselves the name and type of the entity they are living in," Huseyin Celik, a spokesman for the Justice and Development Party, told the Kurdish online news outlet Rudaw last week.

The Kurds have been effectively autonomous since 1991, when the U.S. established a no-fly zone over northern Iraq. Turkey, a strong U.S. ally, has long opposed the creation of an independent Kurdistan so that its own eastern region would not be swallowed into it. But Celik's statement indicates that the country may be starting to view an autonomous Kurdistan as a viable option -- a sort of bulwark against spreading extremism within a deeply unstable country.

"The Kurds, like any other nation, will have the right to decide their fate," Celik told Rudaw, in a story that was picked up by CNN's Turkish-language outlet. "Turkey has been supporting the Kurdistan region till now and will continue this support."

Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan have recently forged a strong bond over oil, much to the chagrin of Iraq, which claims that Baghdad has sole authority over oil in Kurdistan. Turkey recently signed a 50-year energy deal with Iraqi Kurdistan’s semi-autonomous government to export Kurdish oil to the north, and Kurdistan has increased its exports this week despite the insurgency by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk -- known as "the Kurdish Jerusalem" -- has long been an obstacle to independence. The Kurds controlled it briefly in 1991 before Saddam Hussein drove them out amid a horrific chemical weapons attack. Last week, they retook control of the disputed city when Iraqi forces fled ISIS, and it doesn’t look like they’re going to give up the city’s oil reserves. Kirkuk is capable of producing as much as half of all of Iraq's oil exports, although Kirkuk’s pipeline is currently offline following militant attacks in the spring.

On Tuesday, Sherko Jawdat, the chairman of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Natural Resources Committee, told The Huffington Post that Iraqi Kurdistan is aiming to claim a quarter of Iraq’s total oil sales.

“Oil has become an important political card in the region and the whole world,” he said. “Oil is key to Kurdistan’s economic independence, which will eventually lead to political independence.”

Syria and Iran have long opposed the creation of an independent Kurdistan, but Turkey has been the most significant obstacle, as it previously threatened to invade the area if the Kurds declared independence. With Syria's Bashar al-Assad and Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki tied up in civil wars, neither seems to be in a position to stop the Kurds from becoming fully independent.

The United States has also taken a stand against an independent Kurdistan, largely in support of Turkey. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a leading foreign policy voice in conservative circles, was stunned to hear that a Turkish spokesman had opened the door to what the U.S. has so long opposed. "I'm surprised," he told The Huffington Post. "But what about the Kurds in Syria? What about the Kurds in Turkey?"

He said he worries that it would only create more instability and that he never believed in what he called "the Biden plan," or independent Kurdish, Sunni and Shia states. Vice President Joe Biden strongly pushed for partition during the early stages of the Iraq war.

"The Biden plan of partitioning Iraq never made sense to me because the Sunni areas are held by people kicked out by al Qaeda," he said. "Just absorb what I said. From Aleppo to Baghdad, you're gonna have a radical Islamic Sunni group that was too radical for al Qaeda.

"This is what I worry about if you let Iraq fracture: Iranians are going to own the south. ISIS is going to own everything in the Sunni area, and if the Kurds break away, you've got friction for a long time to come between the Turks and Kurds because there are Kurdish elements in Syria, Iran and Turkey."

The Kurds, he suggested, would not settle for a state only in what is today Iraq. "If the Kurds break away, are you going to create a movement inside of Syria? Inside of Turkey and Iran to have a Kurdish state that encompasses those people? So this thing could spiral out of control and that could be another front," he said.

Laura Magnuson, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said that she would "refer [HuffPost] to the Turks regarding their views on Iraq."

Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, was much more open to Kurdish independence, suggesting that regional players must decide what's best. "That's such a complex part of the world over there and it's not up to the United States to answer questions like that," he said. "It's for those folks to answer."

Sunni militants overran one of the last government-held crossings on the Syrian border on Friday after a fierce battle that left at least 34 Iraqi soldiers dead.

The fighting occurred as some clerics during Friday Prayer signaled that they wanted the Parliament to hasten the formation of a new government and reach across sectarian and ethnic divides.

Police and government officials reached in Qaim, the western border city of about 250,000 near the crossing, described a desperate, bloody struggle in which Iraqi Army troops were overwhelmed by “hundreds” of fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Fighters coming from Syria have been able to cross the desert freely for some time, but control of border crossings allows easier transport of fighters — including suicide bombers — and supplies, vehicles and heavy equipment.

“We would have stood and kept on fighting ISIS, but the government didn’t send us backup, and we were few in number and they had more fighters,” said Qaim’s mayor, Farhan al Qubaisi, who described a scene of heroic but ultimately futile resistance as the Iraqi soldiers were overrun. Still, a small part of the city and border crossing remained under government control late Friday, according to local officials and a Western military expert.

“The 34 soldiers who were killed were real heroes; they were facing hundreds of ISIS,” Mr. Qubaisi said, adding that among the dead was the commander of the brigade in charge of Qaim, Col. Majid Al Fedawi.

There are at least three main crossings along the long, serpentine border with Syria, and the Kurdish pesh merga forces took control of the northernmost one a few days ago.

The next closest crossing to Qaim, which is named Al Waleed, remained in government hands on Friday evening, but a police officer stationed in Qaim and other government officials there said that only a small police force was deployed at Al Waleed and that it was unlikely to hold the crossing for long.

The police officer said the ISIS fighters had taken over most of the government buildings in Qaim and freed prisoners being held in the police station.

“Those who were still here from the army have left the battle,” added the officer, who asked for anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to reporters.

The militants, he said, “were in SUVs and pickups carrying heavy weapons.”

In Salahuddin Province, which the militants entered last week, government officials were still fighting to hold the crucial Baiji refinery, which the militants occupied briefly on Wednesday. On Friday, the government forces led by Brig. Gen. Arras Abdul Qadir were inside the refinery, and the militants were besieging it from within the compound but still some distance away.

“I lost many of my soldiers,” General Qadir said in a telephone interview. “I had many killed and wounded.”


Men volunteering to join the Iraqi Army at a recruitment center in Baghdad on Friday.
AYMAN OGHANNA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“The only way to stay connected with forces outside is by air support,” he said, adding that the government had dropped food, ammunition and some additional troops on Friday, in expectation of fresh assaults by ISIS.

“We are ready, we are prepared, we expect them any minute,” he said on Friday night.

Also on Friday, Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a statement through a spokesman calling on Iraq’s diverse political parties to move quickly to form a new government. He also again clarified that his call for volunteers to defend Iraq against extremist jihadis was not meant as a call to arms for Shiites, but for all Iraqis.

Ahmed al-Safi, a leading Shiite cleric and Sistani representative in Karbala, gave the message at Friday Prayer.

Mr. Safi said that all political blocs should stick to the time frame in the Constitution for convening a new Parliament, by July 2, and naming a speaker, the first step in forming a new government. If each step occurred on schedule, a new government could be in place by mid-August, but it could also be accelerated. In the past, the process often took much longer. The most important thing, according to the senior Shiite clerics, is that the new government be inclusive.

“The winning bloc should hold dialogue in order to form an effective government that enjoys wide national acceptance to correct the past mistakes and open new horizons for Iraqis for a better future,” Mr. Safi said.

The statement was interpreted by some as criticism of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, but was no more strongly worded than a number of previous statements from Mr. Sistani’s spokesmen.

On Thursday, President Obama called for Iraqis to form an inclusive government and suggested, indirectly, that Mr. Maliki might not be the best person to do that.

While Mr. Maliki’s party was the biggest vote-getter in the April 30 elections, his 92 seats in Parliament fell far short of the 165 needed for the majority for him to claim a third term as prime minister, although the next largest vote-getter controls only 33 seats.

Reporting was contributed by Rod Nordland and Suadad al-Salhy from Baghdad, a New York Times employee from western Iraq, and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.

frigidmagi wrote:The Ayatollah of Iran opposes American involvement in Iraq

You know what? I'm okay with this. Let the Iranians and ISIS duke it out. Let the Iranians have the joy of trying to prop up a corrupt incompentent government for once!

“The tribes inside and around Haditha, including the Jaghayfah tribe inside the city and the Bou Nimr tribe on the west bank of the Euphrates, will not surrender the city. Whatever the differences we have with the central government, which ignored the legitimate demands of the Iraqi people in the western [region] . . . and allowed groups such as this [ISIS] to enter the country, we will not surrender Haditha.”

Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has rejected calls for a national salvation government to help counter the offensive by jihadist-led Sunni rebels.

Such calls represented a "coup against the constitution and an attempt to end the democratic experience", he warned.

The US has led appeals to the country's political leaders to rise above sectarian and ethnic divisions.

Government forces have been unable to recapture the territory seized by the rebels this month.

Almost half of the 300 US military advisers assigned to help the Iraqi security forces have arrived.

Fighting was reported to have continued on Wednesday, with an attack by rebels on the Balad airbase, about 80km (50 miles) north of Baghdad.

Also on Wednesday, a suicide bombing outside the main market in the northern city of Kirkuk left at least two people dead and many more injured.

The city was seized by Kurdish peshmerga fighters on 12 June when the Iraqi army fled in the face of the rebel advance.

At least nine people were also killed in attacks in the town of Mahmudiyah to the south of Baghdad.

In his weekly televised address, Mr Maliki called on "all political forces to reconcile" in the face of a "fierce terrorist onslaught".

But the Shia prime minister gave no promise of greater representation in government for the minority Sunni Arab community, whose anger at what they say are his sectarian and authoritarian policies has been exploited by jihadist militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis).

Mr Maliki said forming an emergency administration that included all religious and ethnic groups would go against the results of April's parliamentary elections, which were won by his State of Law alliance.

"The dangerous goals of forming a national salvation government are not hidden," he said. "It is an attempt by those who are against the constitution to eliminate the young democratic process and steal the votes of the voters."

Mr Maliki committed to start forming a new governing coalition by 1 July.

Mr Maliki used his weekly TV address to the nation to make it clear he will not be bulldozed into forming a government which does not take into account the result of the election in April.

He is signalling he intends following the normal constitutional mechanism for forming the new government in the coming weeks.

And that will give his alliance of Shia parties, known as the State of Law, the chance to build a coalition of its choice to secure a parliamentary majority and to select who will be the new prime minister.

It was Mr Maliki's political rival Ayad Allawi who raised the issue of a national salvation government which the prime minister has so firmly rejected.

But it seems Mr Maliki is also firing a warning shot across the bows of the international community.

The United States in particular has been putting intense pressure on him to ensure a new government is formed as quickly as possible, with a broad spectrum of politicians.

One Western diplomat has said it should be a matter of days not weeks.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, who has just returned from a two-day visit to Baghdad and Irbil, said he would be going to Saudi Arabia on Friday to hold further talks on the crisis.

Mr Kerry said Mr Maliki was "following through" on commitments to move forward on the process of government formation.

Meanwhile, US and Iraqi officials have been quoted as saying they believe Syrian planes struck rebel positions around the border town of Qaim on Tuesday.

The jihadist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) group has been active in the conflict in Syria and now controls territory on both sides of the border.

Air strikes
The 130 US military advisers are setting up a joint military operations room with the Iraqi army in Baghdad and another in the north.

US officials have made it clear that this is not a "rush to the rescue", although the US advisers are in the position to call in air strikes against the militants if it is deemed necessary.

Their primary job is to assess the capabilities of the Iraqi forces and advise on what should be done, says the BBC's Jim Muir in Irbil.

The US intelligence assessment is that the Sunni rebels spearheaded by Isis are capable of holding the territory they have captured.

Iraqi forces have tacitly recognised that, our correspondent adds. They have been unable to launch any strategic counter-offensives.

They are mainly focusing on two things - harassing the rebels from the air, mainly with attack helicopters, and building up their deployment for the defence of Baghdad, where troop numbers have been doubled.

The Iraqi military's chief spokesman, Gen Qassim Atta, told a news conference on Wednesday that troops were in "full control" of Iraq's largest refinery at Baiji, which has seen repeated clashes in recent days.

frigidmagi wrote:I swear to God it's like he's actually working for ISIS!

The Kurdish judge who sentenced former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to death is alive and well, contrary to international media reports he was executed by the jihadi-led insurgents blazing across Iraq, a Kurdish official and a family member told Rudaw.

A spokesperson for the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Ministry of Justice in Erbil said he had personally spoken to Rauf Rashid Abdulrahman, the judge who sentenced Saddam to death by hanging in 2006, and that reports he had died were false.

"Those are only rumors and they are totally baseless,” Nariman Talib Moryasi told Rudaw. “I personally contacted Judge Rauf yesterday and he is well and living his normal life.”

Abdulrahman was the chief judge of the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal, which tried Saddam and a number of his top aides. He was accused of being prejudiced by some critics because he is from Halabja, the Kurdish town that was bombarded with poison gas by Saddam’s forces during the closing weeks of the 1980-88 war with Iran.

Abdulrahman reportedly lost several relatives in the attack, which killed 5,000 Kurdish civilians, many of them women and children. There are also unconfirmed claims he was imprisoned and tortured by Saddam’s men in the 1980s.

International media reports that Abdulrahma had been executed began circulating shortly after the insurgents -- who include the jihadist Sunni Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and loyalists of Saddam’s former Baath regime -- began a blitz a fortnight ago that has seen them conquer cities and installations and close in on Baghdad.

A close family member of Abdulrahman told Rudaw that nothing untoward had happened to the judge since he moved to the Kurdistan Region, the three-province Kurdish enclave that has remained the only peaceful and economically prospering portion of Iraq.

“Judge Rauf was the target of multiple assassination attempts while he was in Baghdad, but no such incident has happened in the Kurdistan Region,” said the family member, speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“He has not been captured or killed by ISIS and he is well and currently in a safe place,” the relative confirmed.

Since the trial and Saddam’s execution, Abdulrahman and his family have shunned media attention, mostly for security reasons and to avoid threats.

Rumors of his execution “must be the work of the Baathists, aimed at increasing their own publicity,” the judge’s relative said.

The relative added that security officials in Kurdistan had asked the family to take extra security measures, in light of the turmoil in the rest of Iraq.

Heavy shelling shook the militant stronghold of Tikrit on Sunday as Iraqi security forces attempted to recapture the town in an operation that marks a major test for the military as it tries to gain the upper hand against insurgents.

Ground forces backed by helicopter gunships launched a three-pronged pre-dawn attack Saturday, but residents and a tribal leader said militants from an al-Qaeda breakaway group had repelled the troops’ advance, rigging roads into Tikrit with explosives.

Residents said insurgents from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), who have been assisted by local anti-government groups, were still in control of the town center Sunday, despite state television claims that Iraqi forces had cleared Tikrit of militants.

With the ground attack repelled on three fronts, special forces who had airlifted into Tikrit University, setting up base at the nearby al Sahra airbase earlier in the week, attempted to break in from the northwest on Sunday, residents said.

Abu Ghaib, a 35-year-old Tikrit resident who chose to use a pseudonym for fear of reprisals, said there was intense helicopter fire and shelling Sunday in the area near university.

1 of 53
Shiite Iraqis prepare to fight Sunni militants
Members of an all-volunteer force undergo training in the holy city of Karbala to protect Shiite shrines and help counter the recent gains of the Sunni insurgent group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
“What the people believe is that the army is advancing from the university,” he said. “But we don’t know for sure.”

The recapture of Tikrit, which is about 90 miles north of Baghdad and the home town of ousted president Saddam Hussein, would give a boost to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as he struggles to hold on to power in the face of a nearly three-week offensive by extremist fighters from ISIS. But a high-profile failure would deliver a deep blow to already disheartened forces.


“Some families have nowhere to flee to and they are quite terrified,” Abu Ghaib said. “The southern entrance to the city is like a ghost town, many have fled.”

With only helicopters and fixed propeller planes, Iraqi military officials have complained they lack the airpower to fight insurgents. On Sunday, the defense ministry took delivery of a Russian-made Sukhoi SU-25 fighter jet. It said five jets would enter service in the next three or four days.

Iraqi military officers have taken pains to stress that the initiative is now in their hands, following an extensive land grab by an insurgency that has boasted of mass executions in Tikrit.

On Saturday, police took journalists, accompanied by armed escorts, to the perimeters of western Baghdad to show that the capital is fully under their control.

“The animals are eating the corpses of ISIS,” Brig. Resan al-Brahimi, a federal police commander, told the assembled journalists. “The balance has shifted.”

Elite counterterrorism forces were also air-dropped into the nearby town of Siniyah and the oil refinery at Baiji in the days before the Tikrit offensive, according to Ammar Toma, a member of parliament’s defense and security committee. The newfound confidence has led to speculation that recently arrived U.S. advisers had helped plan the operations.

“There has certainly been a positive development in the conduct of the security forces, particularly the elite forces,” Toma said. “This has all happened after the arrival of U.S. consultants. Now it’s a case of wait and see.”


But the success of the new offensives is yet to be proved, and it is unclear whether Iraqi army forces — which have made up for mass desertions with rapid training of new recruits — will be able to hold retaken ground in areas where anti-government sentiment runs high.

At Baiji, counterterrorism forces appeared to have weathered the desertion of hundreds of Iraqi soldiers Monday night and regained control of the refinery, according to a senior North Oil Co. official, although militants still control the surrounding area, rendering the facility unusable. Security officials, meanwhile, said that the Mansuriya gas field, which militants attacked Friday, had been secured by special forces.

The Tikrit operation, which began when counterterrorism forces in four helicopters were air-dropped Thursday, appeared to run into difficulties from the outset. One helicopter was shot down and another suffered mechanical failure, residents said.

Since then, however, special forces have set up at the nearby al-Sahra air base, the former Speicher U.S. military base, according to a tribal leader from Tikrit who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons. He claimed that the crew of one of the helicopters — a Lebanese national and “two or three” Iraqis — had been taken hostage by ISIS.

With their special forces in place to the northwest, Iraqi troops launched an offensive from three directions — the main Baghdad highway to the south, a road from Samarra to the southeast and the Irbil road to the northwest — early Saturday, according to a version of events laid out by the tribal leader and three other local residents contacted by phone.


Most residents have fled Tikrit. Several who remained claimed government forces have used barrel bombs — explosives-packed drums that are notorious for causing high numbers of civilian casualties due to their inaccuracy.

It is not the first time Iraqi forces have been accused of dropping the makeshift munitions, a well-known tactic of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as he battles rebels across the border. New York-based Human Rights Watch last month accused the Iraqi government of using barrel bombs in Fallujah, in the western province of Anbar, where insurgents have continued to make gains.

On the media tour Saturday, Brahimi, the police commander, stopped near the border of Abu Ghraib, the city’s western gateway from Anbar. “The enemies say they are on the outskirts of Baghdad,” he declared. “Where are they?”

But Jabbar Abed, a 31-year-old carpenter who lives in Abu Ghraib, said the answer was: “Not far.”

“It’s a very bad situation,” he said. “Every one is scared they will take control. Every day there are clashes.”

Ben Van Heuvelen in Irbil and Abigail Hauslohner in Beirut contributed to this report.

Security forces backed by helicopters battled supporters of a radical cleric in the Shiite holy city of Karbala on Wednesday, as spreading violence threatened to pull more areas of the country into turmoil.

The clashes erupted when the security forces tried to seize the offices of Shiite cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi, who has sharply criticized the government. The fighting marked the first sign of a potential for violent rifts within the Shiite community as the government battles an Sunni insurgency inspired by al-Qaeda. Two members of the security forces were killed, along with an unconfirmed number of the cleric’s gunmen, according to a local official.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is trying to prevent the breakup of Iraq in the face of an offensive by the heavily armed insurgents, who have already declared an Islamic state stretching across Iraqi and Syrian territory. But the threats to Iraq’s territorial integrity are many, as the Kurds prepare to vote on independence farther north and Shiite dissatisfaction bubbles in the south.

With violence engulfing the country, Maliki on Wednesday offered an amnesty to Sunni tribesmen who have joined the insurgency, his latest attempt to claw back control. In his weekly televised address, the embattled prime minister called on tribal leaders to stand behind the Iraqi state, although he said that in cases of “spilled blood” it would be up to victims’ families to decide whether the tribesmen should be forgiven. After overrunning the northern city of Mosul on June 10, Sunni fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now renamed Islamic State, have seized territory in the north and west and proclaimed a caliphate on captured lands.


“They should return to their senses,” Maliki said of the tribesmen. “I welcome them. I welcome them back. I welcome their unity with their brothers from other tribes.”

The United States successfully brought Sunni tribesmen on board to battle al-Qaeda as part of the Sunni Awakening movement starting in 2005. But Maliki, a Shiite, has not kept up payments or fulfilled promises to incorporate the Sunnis into the security forces, stirring resentment.

He has also faced opposition from Shiites themselves, including Sarkhi in Karbala, about 55 miles southwest of Baghdad.

Iraqi forces attempted to enter Sarkhi’s compound just after midnight, and his armed supporters battled them for nine hours, said the local official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to provide information. He said helicopters fired on the compound.

It was not immediately possible to confirm the death toll, which Iraqi news media put at between three and 14. Sarkhi, who split from the anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in 2004, posted pictures of slain supporters on his official Web site. Another photo showed what was described as a burning Iraqi military Humvee.

“These militia-like actions are a result of the stand of [Sarkhi], who rejects division and sectarianism, which has killed the people of Iraq,” said a statement on the site.

After the clashes, Karbala, home to one of Shiite Islam’s most revered shrines, was on lockdown Wednesday, with cars banned from the roads as security forces attempted to clear the area. Sarkhi has expressed opposition to Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who has called on all able-bodied Iraqis to take up arms against the radical Sunni insurgents. He has also repeatedly tried to take control of the city’s Imam Abbas shrine, the local official said.


In a sign that the unrest could spread, supporters of the cleric attempted to attack a police station in Diwaniyah, about 70 miles southeast of Karbala, according to residents. In the southern oil port of Basra, meanwhile, protesters blocked roads with burning tires, although the provincial governor told television stations that the action was unrelated to Karbala’s violence.

Maliki stressed Wednesday that Iraqi civilians should take up arms only under the authority of the security forces. He also rejected calls for independence by the semiautonomous Kurdish region, saying that such a move would be unconstitutional.

“Firstly, I’d like warn the Kurdish people, who are treated unjustly, that this will harm you,” he said. “It will throw this region in a labyrinth that you will not be able to escape. Secondly, you decided, according to the constitution, to be part of Iraq.”

He criticized the Kurds, who have been expanding their areas of control into disputed territory, for seizing the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk without a referendum.

His speech came just a day after the first session of Iraq’s newly elected parliament broke up in disarray, with no progress on forming a new government. The legislative session ended in heated arguments and a walkout, an indication of the divisions besetting the country.

Maliki, who is trying to secure a third term in office despite dwindling support, said he hoped that next week’s parliamentary session would be more productive and that factions would be “realistic.” While the political process is important, he said, there must also be a focus on the “battle.”

Amid the violence, Maliki has been trying to bolster Iraq’s air power, with neighboring Iran stepping in as Baghdad waits for U.S. deliveries of F-16 fighters and Apache helicopters. Iran has returned several Soviet-era SU-25 fighter jets to Iraq, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, which analyzed serial numbers in images released by the Iraqi Defense Ministry this week.

The jets were abandoned in Iran by fleeing Iraqi air force pilots during the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and Iran impounded them, claiming the planes as war reparations. Iraq has been urgently requesting their release since the violence broke out.

As Islamic extremists seek to sweep away borders in their advance across the Middle East, Kurds in northern Iraq appear to be in the process of digging a new one, asserting their claim to hotly disputed territory and expanding their semi-autonomous region in a bid for greater autonomy or outright independence.

The emerging frontier of sand berms, trenches and roadblocks is being built to take in areas Kurdish fighters seized as Sunni militants led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant swept across northern Iraq last month, routing the armed forces of the Shiite-led government in Baghdad and raising fears the country could be torn in three.

Kurdish forces say they assumed control of the disputed territory in and around Kirkuk -- a major oil hub -- to prevent it from being taken over by the Sunni insurgents as Iraqi troops melted away. They say the defense of the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) frontier is necessary to prevent the militants, who have declared a transnational Islamic state straddling the Syrian-Iraqi border, from advancing further.

"This is a security measure. We are dealing with a serious threat," said Falah Bakir, the Kurdish region's top foreign policy official. "We are neighbors to a terrorist state — the Islamic State — and we have to take measures to ensure our safety."

But the barriers, hastily built over the past few days, are also defining the borders of a possible future Kurdish state, and laying the groundwork for a conflict with Baghdad over Kirkuk, which has a mixed population of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen.

Politicians close to Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have condemned the Kurds' assertion of control over the disputed areas outside their semi-autonomous region, accusing them of exploiting the security breakdown to pursue their long-held dream of greater autonomy or outright statehood.

The United States and Iraq's regional neighbors Turkey and Iran -- both of which have large Kurdish minorities -- are opposed to Kurdish independence.

The Kurds say they have tried for years to reach an agreement with Baghdad on where to draw the frontier of their semi-autonomous region, but say the Shiite-led government and Sunni leaders dragged their feet. They point to a constitutional amendment requiring that Kirkuk's fate be decided by referendum, but which has never been implemented.

"If the Shiite forces and the Sunni forces don't abide by this pact between the sides, to draw the borders of Iraq, to draw the borders of the province of Kurdistan, so it is the right of the Kurdish province to take the areas that were taken away from it," said the Kurdish deputy head of the Kirkuk Provincial Council, Rebwar Talabani.

Over the past week, Kurdish forces known as the peshmerga have erected dirt barriers outside Iraq's second largest city of Mosul, which was seized by the Islamic State last month. The barriers take in disputed territory but also protect nearby villages inhabited by Christians and other minorities from the Islamic extremists.

At the last peshmerga checkpoint before Mosul mounds of earth several meters (yards high) and rows of concrete barriers flank the highway. A Kurdish fighter wearing beige military fatigues stood in the back of a jeep, scanning the horizon with binoculars.

"We are drawing the border on the disputed areas, which is our right," said the jeep's driver, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press. When asked about the objections voiced by the government in Baghdad, he laughed. "What government in Baghdad?"

At another point in the frontier, a few kilometers (miles) outside Kirkuk near the village of Mariam Bek, the border was marked by a muddy canal. The half-dozen bridges crossing over it were blocked to prevent suicide bombers from entering the city, said Gen. Shirko Fatih, commander of Kurdish troops in Kirkuk.

Just up the road, Islamic State fighters had built their own dirt barrier. Fifty miles (80 kilometers) further along is the city of Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, which is held by the Sunni insurgents.

The Kurds argue that they are protecting everyone in Kirkuk from Islamic extremists, but an Arab official said his community would not accept the defensive fortifications being turned into a border.

"This for us is rejected," said Rakan Ali, the Arab deputy governor of Kirkuk. There was a difference, he said, between defending a city and seizing it.

The Kurdish foreign policy director Bakir insisted that any final borders would be set by referendum and not by dirt berms and concrete walls.

"Now that our forces are in this area, we will make a referendum to determine if the people want to be part of Kurdistan," he said.

But other Kurds look at the chaos engulfing Iraq and believe they should seize their moment and press all the way south to the Hamreen hills, some (200 kilometers) 130 miles from Kirkuk, a natural frontier.

"If we go to history, the border is not here, it is further away in Hamreen," said a 36-year-old commander in Mariam Bek, surveying the territory from a sniper tower. "This is not my border. We want more."

Militants from the Islamic State group seized control of Syria's largest oil field from rival Islamist fighters on Thursday, strengthening its advance across the eastern Deir al-Zor province, an opposition monitoring group said.

The capture of the al-Omar oil field gives Islamic State control of crude reserves which could be useful to its advancing fighters, and underlines how the al Qaeda offshoot has eclipsed its militant rivals by capturing territory and assets across Syria and Iraq in the past few weeks.

It has declared an Islamic 'caliphate' on lands it has seized in both countries, and urged Muslims worldwide to flock there and wage holy war.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Islamic State "took leadership" of the oil field from Nusra Front, the official wing of al Qaeda in Syria.

A video posted on the Internet showed a group of armed men dressed in black outside what they said was the entrance to al-Omar oil field.

One fighter said they had not faced any resistance from Nusra Front and that they had captured the field on the fifth day of Ramadan, or Thursday.

"God is greatest and thanks to God. Islamic State! God is greatest!" the men chanted. It was not possible to independently verify the contents of the video.

Nusra Front, which had captured the oil field from the Syrian government in November, had claimed to be producing around 10,000 barrels of oil a day from the field, which has a capacity of 75,000.

Syria is not a significant oil producer and has not exported any oil since late 2011, when international sanctions took effect to raise pressure on President Bashar al-Assad.

Before sanctions, Syria exported 370,000 barrels per day, mainly to Europe.

TOWNS CAPTURED

Nusra Front fighters also withdrew from two towns in Deir al-Zor on Thursday, leaving most of the border province under the control of advancing forces of the Islamic State, the Observatory said.

It said the Nusra Front pulled out of Mayadin and Shuhail, the group's regional stronghold, while local tribal fighters had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, which has also swept through Sunni Muslim provinces in Iraq.

The Observatory, a British-based monitoring group, said the Islamic State, previously called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), now controls an area of Syria five times the size of neighboring Lebanon.

It has followed al Qaeda's hardline ideology, but has alienated Osama bin Laden's successor Ayman al-Zawahri and other Islamists with its extreme violence.

The jihadi group, which claims authority over Muslims worldwide, has seized weapons from arms depots in Syria and Iraq, money from bank vaults in cities it has overrun, and controls other oil fields and farmlands.

In Deir al-Zor province only the regional capital and airport - still held by President Bashar al-Assad's forces - and a few villages remain outside the Islamic State's control, the Observatory said.

Earlier this week the Islamic State seized the town of Albu Kamal on the Iraqi frontier from the Nusra Front, securing both sides of the border crossing.

Muslim scholars and movements from across the Sunni Islamic spectrum have rejected the caliphate declared by the Islamic State group, with the fighters receiving scathing criticism from both mainstream religious leaders, and those associated with their former allies, al-Qaeda.

Assem Barqawi, also known as Abu Mohamed al-Maqdesi, who was released from a Jordanian prison in June after serving a sentence for recruiting volunteers to fight in Afghanistan, called fighters loyal to the Islamic State group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, "deviant".

Maqdesi, a supporter of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, hit out at the Islamic State group for its brutal methods. "Is this caliphate a sanctuary for the vulnerable and a refuge for all Muslims, or a sword hanging over those Muslims who disagree with them," Maqdesi said.

In rejecting the self-proclaimed caliphate, Maqdesi, a Salafi, has found himself on the same side as Sufi leaders, such as the Syrian Muhammad al-Yacoubi.

In a post on his Twitter account, the Syrian exile similarly described the followers of the group, formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), as "deviators".

"[The] Khilafah state (ISIL) declared is illegitimate," Yacoubi said. Adding that supporting it is "haram", or forbidden.

The view was echoed by Qatar-based Egyptian religious leader, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who said the declaration was "void" according to Islamic law.

"A group simply announcing a caliphate, is not enough to establish a caliphate," Qaradawi said in an open letter published on the website for the International Union of Muslim Scholars, which he heads.

There was similar admonishment from the pan-Islamic political party Hizb ut-Tahrir, which believes it is a religious obligation for Muslims to work towards establishing a caliphate.

"The issue of the Khilafah is too great for its image to be distorted or for its reality to be changed merely by an announcement here or an announcement there," the group said in a statement on its website.

Speaking during Friday prayers, Rachid Ghannouchi, the founder of the Ennahda Party, Tunisia's main Islamist party, added to the chorus of criticism, calling the declaration of a caliphate by followers of Baghdadi a "reckless" act, which gave a "deceptive message".

"Nations do not arise in this ridiculous way," he told his followers.

RELATED: Opinion - Baghdadi's misconstrued caliphate

Farid Senzai, a professor of Middle East politics at Santa Clara University, told Al Jazeera many Muslim groups felt the Islamic State group was hurting their cause.

"The Baghdadi caliphate is rejected by most mainstream Islamists because they feel it damages their cause to establish an Islamic system through peaceful means," Senzai said.

He added the fighters were further discredited by their "harsh implementation" of Islamic law.

According to Senzai, that rejection was shared among ordinary believers.

"Many Muslims would support a caliphate as an idea but not support ISIL because of its violent methodology," he said.

Despite its sizeable list of critics, the disapproval is unlikely to have a big effect on Baghdadi’s followers.

"They do not care about traditional and mainstream scholars, they have their own interpretation which they continue to insist gives them legitimacy," Senzai said.

On June 29, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) declared itself a caliphate with its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the caliph. The declaration struck the jihadi movement like a bombshell. Hani al-Siba’i, a radical ideologue based in the United Kingdom, said on Twitter that he nearly choked on his Ramadan breakfast when he heard the news.

The move is bold and unprecedented. The caliphate is a form of government associated with early Islam and with the successive Islamic empires that dominated the Muslim world until the early 1920s. While most Muslims today view the caliphate as a thing of the past, jihadis see it as an ideal form of government that ought to be reinstated. Still, jihadis have thus far viewed the caliphate as a utopia—much like Marxist groups viewed the perfect communist society—because the Islamic legal conditions for establishing a caliphate are difficult to meet in the modern international system. For decades, restoring the caliphate has been the declared end objective of all jihadi groups, but none of them has had the audacity to declare one—until now.

For “old” jihadi groups like al-Qaida, ISIS’s move is utterly preposterous. The veterans see themselves as having spent a lifetime fighting superpowers, all the while holding back on declaring a caliphate—only to see a bunch of newcomers come in from the sidelines and steal the trophy. Adding insult to injury, ISIS is now demanding that the veterans submit to the authority of a young, obscure (at least until yesterday) caliph. That demand comes because in theory, the leader of a caliphate rules all Muslims and has supreme executive authority in military matters. All this while ISIS supporters taunt the old guard on social media with comments such as: “If Al-Qaida and al-Taliban could not establish khilafah [caliphate] with all their power and territory for all these years, how can we expect them to suddenly unite upon haqq [truth] now? Al-Khilafah does not need them, rather, they need al-khilafah.”

As J.M. Berger has pointed out, ISIS’s strategy is a risky one. There is a very real chance that they will emerge from this verbal fistfight heavily bruised. A number of the world’s most senior jihadi ideologues have already come out against ISIS on the caliphate question, and the criticism from supporters of al-Qaida and groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaida-anointed jihadi group in Syria, has been scathing. Meanwhile, ISIS has so far only received the pledge of allegiance (bay’a) from a small number of minor clerics, dissidents from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and groups in the Syrian-Iraqi theater that were at risk of being swallowed by ISIS anyway. To be sure, ISIS has also seen many declarations of support from grassroots sympathizers around the world, but it is unclear whether these are newly won adherents or people who were cheering on ISIS already. As Berger put it in another article, it looks like “ISIS threw a party and nobody came.”

This raises the question: why did they do it? It is hard to believe that ISIS simply miscalculated and genuinely thought the entire jihadi movement would submit to their authority. ISIS is not an isolated sect, but a tech-savvy bureaucracy that monitors enemy Twitter accounts and consumes academic literature (in fact, they will probably read this very article). They must have known the lay of the ideological land. We should therefore not dismiss the move as ideological excess, but rather assume it was based on a careful calculus.

It is possible, for example, that this was a bid for the youth vote in the jihadi movement. ISIS may have realized it was not going to win over the pro-al-Qaida old guard anyway, but that there was a potential to further increase its appeal among young recruits, especially abroad. Bear in mind that for the past three years, virtually all of the world’s new jihadi foreign fighters have gone to Syria, where a majority has joined ISIS. By comparison, only a handful have gone to Pakistan, Yemen, or Algeria to train with al-Qaida and its affiliates. Moreover, ISIS has arguably been the biggest game in town the past year in terms of visibility on the jihadi Internet. Finally, with its battlefield advances in Iraq over the past month, ISIS has demonstrated real-life impact that other jihadi groups can only dream of. New recruits—who tend to be young, male, and impatient—may be attracted to the group that gets things done. Declaring a caliphate consolidates this youth appeal by adding another element of bravado to the ISIS project. In such a context, heavy criticism from the ideological establishment may paradoxically bestow an underdog image on ISIS, which younger recruits may find attractive. What the older generation sees as youthful arrogance, the new generation often sees as legitimate opposition to the established order. We see examples of this attitude in recent Twitter messages from ISIS soldiers: one Twitter user who goes by the name “Abu Klashnikov” openly rejects the legitimacy of traditional religious authority figures, declaring, “I dont care for no shaykhs name stop namedropping me these so called big shaykhs.”

If the caliphate declaration was an attempt to drive a wedge in the jihadi generation gap, we may be looking in the wrong place when we take the reactions of so-called heavyweight ideologues as a measure of ISIS’s success. A better metric might be the response from low-level activists online and in the street. Another thing to watch is the flow of foreign fighters to ISIS in the months to come.

One might object that theology matters, and that young Islamists are in fact receptive to the scholarly arguments against the ISIS declaration. But we may be overestimating the sensitivity of younger generations of jihadists to the term “caliphate.” The past two decades have seen a trend toward increasingly bold statehood claims by jihadi groups, and this may have watered down the taboo associated with the modern use of the term caliphate. In the late 1990s, for example, Mullah Omar took the title “Commander of the Faithful” (Amir al-Mu’minin), a title traditionally reserved for the caliph. In addition, the past decade has seen the declaration of at least 15 different jihadi “emirates” in different parts of the Muslim world, a terminological development unthinkable thirty years earlier. Last but not least, ISIS itself has used the term “Islamic state” in its own name since 2006, and then-leader Abu ‘Umar al-Baghdadi also styled himself “Commander of the Faithful.” This caused some controversy at first, but people soon got used to it (the group’s decline in the late 2000s had little to do with the name). ISIS may therefore be calculating that younger Islamists do not see the liberal use of the word caliphate as such a big deal, and that their doctrinal doubts will be offset by the sense of achievement that comes with finally having a “real” Islamic state.

Another possibility, not incompatible with the preceding one, is that ISIS declared a caliphate in order to complicate U.S. plans to support an Iraqi counteroffensive against ISIS. A drone campaign against ISIS now would likely rally the jihadi movement behind the new caliphate and trigger a wave of terrorist attacks in the West. Of course, Western action against ISIS at any time would have an effect of this type, but the caliphate declaration likely increases its potential scale. This is partly because it would make it easier for ISIS to persuade other groups to act on its behalf, and partly because it would allow ISIS to exploit, for recruitment purposes, the widespread Islamist conviction that the West never tolerates Islamist governments.

It was probably no coincidence that two days before the caliphate declaration, ISIS launched a Twitter hashtag campaign titled “#CalamityWillBefallUS” that threatened the United States with terrorist attacks in the event of drone strikes. The campaign generated tens of thousands of tweets and was covered widely by international media. While the majority of tweets were probably automatically generated, there were several hundred unique messages, several of which were produced or retweeted by foreign fighters in the field. Of course, one might argue that such threats are common on the Internet and should therefore not be taken too seriously. However, this campaign differed from other online threats in both its scale (hundreds of unique messages) and specificity (being linked to drone attacks). Failure to implement such a widely publicized threat would mean a considerable loss of credibility for ISIS and its supporters. Besides, while many Internet threats are cases of intention without capability, ISIS may well have the capability to launch—or at least inspire—attacks in the West, given the many Western foreign fighters in its ranks.

In combination, the Twitter threat campaign and the caliphate declaration arguably constitute a certain deterrent against U.S. military operations against ISIS in Iraq, at least in the short term. To be clear, the threats alone do not make much difference, for U.S. military strategy is not guided by fear of terrorist reprisals (on the contrary, threats can make U.S. intervention more likely). However, the caliphate declaration has created a temporary political situation in which the entire jihadi movement is having to decide whether to support ISIS or not. A U.S. offensive in Iraq right now would force that decision in ISIS’s favor for many groups and individuals. Had the caliphate not been declared, a U.S. intervention would not have quite the same rallying effect. Of course, the U.S. may well choose to ignore these factors, but then at least ISIS has done what it could to maximize the cost for the United States associated with an offensive. If, on the other hand, the United States decides to postpone its contribution to the Iraqi counteroffensive, ISIS will temporarily face less resistance. The caliphate declaration may thus have been partly designed—or at least timed—to help ISIS consolidate its territorial gains in Iraq.

The caliphate declaration may thus produce two tangible strategic benefits for ISIS: greater recruitment appeal among young jihadists and a delayed U.S. intervention in Iraq. There may be other benefits too, not least increased morale in ISIS’s existing ranks.

But there are potential costs as well. In the short term, old-guard jihadi ideologues may persuade Gulf donors to give less money to ISIS. Other rebel groups in Syria may start collaborating even more closely to fight ISIS. Western governments may become more inclined to supply weapons to anti-ISIS rebel groups in Syria. In the longer term, ISIS’s appeal to jihadi youth may decline as the group is pushed on the defensive, the novelty factor wears off, and governance problems accumulate.

However, a closer look at these costs suggests they are not as large as they may seem. Recent evidence suggests that ISIS is less dependent on Gulf donors than previously assumed. As for the other negative developments, they probably would have occurred anyway. In other words, this was not a real gamble, because there was not much to lose. Let’s consider the counterfactual scenario in which ISIS did not declare the caliphate. By late June, the group had made too many advances in Iraq and too many enemies in Syria to be left alone. In Iraq it faced a government counteroffensive supported by U.S. drones and Special Forces. In Syria, it faced continued opposition from Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic Front. And in the West, it faced increasingly strong measures against foreign fighter recruitment. With this scenario as the alternative, declaring a caliphate may well have been the slightly better option. Thus the caliphate declaration may have been arrogant, but it was not delusional, and we should continue to understand ISIS as a pragmatic, rational actor. Ideology and self-interest can go hand in hand, and sometimes the best thing and the right thing are the same.

At the same time, the caliphate declaration is probably not a game-changer. It spells neither boon nor disaster for ISIS. It is admittedly still early to draw conclusions about the effects of the declaration, because we do not know exactly how the jihadi grassroots will respond or what the U.S. role in the Iraqi counteroffensive will be. However, at this point it looks like the declaration made a marginally positive difference to ISIS’s situation.

How good that situation is depends on the reference point. Judged by the standards of transnational jihadi groups, ISIS is doing exceptionally well. Never before has an Islamist group this radical had so much territory, so much money, and so many Western recruits. Even if ISIS was literally decimated—that is, reduced to a tenth of its current size—it would still be one of the largest jihadi groups in the world. However, by the standards of national insurgencies, ISIS is in some trouble. Further expansion—to Baghdad, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan—is highly unlikely given the obstacles in their way. They may preserve much of their territorial gains in Iraq in the next few months, but within a year the Iraqi government should, with U.S. assistance, be able to push them back to where they were in early 2014. In the longer term, ISIS may face governance strain in its remaining areas as locals tire of strict moral policing and economic stagnation. In addition, they face a broad alliance of intelligence services that knows more and more about them. Three years from now, ISIS will probably be substantially weaker than it is today, but for reasons other than the caliphate declaration.

The bottom line is that business in the jihadi world will largely continue as usual after the declaration. Over time, the new caliphate will come to be seen as just another militant group, albeit a very presumptuous one. In the meantime, it is probably wise for Western governments to let the internal jihadi debate run its course. Premature military intervention will give the caliphate a jump start it does not deserve.

Christian families streamed out of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Saturday after Islamist fighters said they would be killed if they did not pay a protection tax or convert to Islam.

“For the first time in the history of Iraq, Mosul is now empty of Christians,” Patriarch Louis Sako lamented as hundreds of families fled ahead of a noon deadline set by Islamic State for them to submit or leave.

The warning was read out in Mosul’s mosques on Friday afternoon, and broadcast throughout the city on loudspeakers.

“We offer [Christians] three choices: Islam; the dhimma contract - involving payment... if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword,” the announcement read.

It said Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who the group has now named Caliph Ibrahim, had ordered Christians who did not want to stay and live under those terms to “leave the borders of the Islamic Caliphate”.

The central government in Baghdad has lost control of vast swathes of territory to Islamic State since their lightning push through northern Iraq last month, eventually declaring its establishment of a “caliphate” covering the land it holds in Iraq and Syria.

On Saturday morning, Mosul residents described an exodus of hundreds of Christians walking on foot in Iraq’s searing summer heat, the elderly and the disabled among them.

A bishop in the neighbouring town of Tel Keif told the Telegraph that many of Mosul’s displaced Christians had were gathered in his church.

“We’re providing people with shelter, food and water - people don’t have anything left and they can’t travel without the money to buy tickets,” said Bishop Yosip Benjamin.

He said the town’s Christians were fearful of suffering the same fate as those in Mosul. “We’re being threatened everyday,” he said. “Now, we don’t have anything left but our faith. It’s like life has stopped, and we are so tired.”
In recent days, Islamic State fighters had reportedly been tagging Mosul’s Christian houses with the letter N for “Nassarah”, the term by which the Koran refers to Christians.

“I’m staying. I already feel dead,” Fadi, a teacher, told AFP by telephone on Saturday, moments before the midday deadline ran out.

“Only my soul remains, and if they want to take that I don’t have a problem,” he added.

Islamic State fighters robbed departing Christians of their belongings, he said, leaving them to face destitution in grim camps for the displaced. Deprived of their cars and cash, many Christians were forced to walk to safety.

The jihadists had previously insisted that Iraq’s minorities had little to fear from their invasion, using social media to assure the wider world that they had no quarrel with Christians who observe their rules.

Islamic State first rose to prominence in Syria’s interminable civil war, growing from an extremist fringe group to the strongest, best funded and best armed militia in modern history.

The group says it aims to return the lands they conquer to a state approximating that of early Islam, in which Jews and Christians who did not convert had to pay a “jizya” tribute to their Muslim rulers.

The concept dates back to the early Islamic era in the seventh century, but was largely abolished during the Ottoman reforms of the mid-19th century.

Mosul’s Christian community, one of the oldest in the world, has shrunk rapidly in the years since US-led forces pushed Saddam Hussein from power. Before 2003 the city’s Christians numbered some 60,000 people, but that dropped to some 35,000 by June this year, Mr Sako told AFP.

He said another 10,000 fled Mosul after the militant-led offensive began sweeping across Iraq on June 9.
But many had held on, hoping to reach some sort of accommodation.

Others said they were willing to fight. On a visit to the Christian settlement of Bartella, ten miles from Mosul, in mid-June, the Telegraph found a community mounting what it perceived as a last stand against the advancing militants.
Islamic State’s ultimatum seemed to put paid to any hopes of co-existence or resistance.

Since the insurgents arrived in Mosul, even if their forces of occupation are largely local Baathist remnants, they have posted rules for the implementation of their strict Sharia.

These demand that women should be covered and only go outside “if necessary”. Drugs, alcohol and cigarettes are banned, and all shrines, monuments and graveyards - seen as idolatrous in Salafi forms of Sunni Islam - will be destroyed.

On Friday, the United Nations accused Islamic State fighters in Iraq of a range of atrocities that it said could amount to war crimes.

At least 5,576 Iraqi civilians have been killed this year in violence, the UN said in a report that provides the most detailed account yet of the impact of unrest culminating in advances by Sunni rebels led by Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS, across the north.

“Every day we receive accounts of a terrible litany of human rights violations being committed in Iraq against ordinary Iraqi children, women and men, who have been deprived of their security, their livelihoods, their homes, education, healthcare and other basic services,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said.
The report also details violations committed by government forces and affiliated groups, citing “summary executions/extrajudicial killings of prisoners and detainees”, which it said may also constitute a war crime.

It called on the government to investigate serious violations and to hold the perpetrators to account.

But the capacity of the Shia-led caretaker government to do so in the face of a Sunni uprising that threatens to fracture the country on sectarian and ethnic lines may be limited.

Iraqi politicians have yet to complete the formation of a new government more than three months after parliamentary elections, and the bruised Iraqi army has leaned heavily on Shia militia and volunteers in its battle against the Sunni insurgency.