Iraq: Looming War of Shiite, Kurdish, Extremist-Sunni Militias

http://www.juancole.com/2014/06/looming-extremist-militias.html

Iraq: Looming War of Shiite, Kurdish, Extremist-Sunni Militias
By Juan Cole | Jun. 12, 2014

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is apparently keeping control of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city of 2 million, and advanced to take Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, where they held a huge Sunni prayer session.

It has been pointed out by a number of commentators that ISIS (also sometimes called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL) is probably too small an organization of cadre fighters actually to have accomplished all this by itself. Sunni tribes and townspeople appear to have joined in the attacks on the Iraqi military, which, ran away.

Since the military is largely Shiite and had been lording it over local Sunnis as though they were an occupied and humiliated population, it isn’t any wonder that they fled in the face of a popular uprising against them. They couldn’t have stood against so many hostile Sunnis. (There is a parallel to the Taliban withdrawal from Kabul in late 2001, long before they would have had to do so on purely military grounds As Pushtuns in a large hostile Tajik city, they had to worry about a popular massacre of the occupiers; this had happened in Mazar in 1997). But it is also the case that the new Iraqi army is green, whereas ISIS has been involved in fierce guerrilla war for two years and is way ahead on tactics.

Spokesman for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Adnan called for its fighters to advance on Baghdad. He addressed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as an incompetent screw-up who had squandered a historic opportunity for his “people” (the Shiites?) by his misrule of Iraq.