A Country Implodes: ISIS Pushes Iraq to the Brink

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-implosion-of-iraq-at-the-hands-of-the-isis-islamists-a-975541.html



The terror group ISIS has occupied vast portions of Syria and Iraq in the hopes of establishing a caliphate. The jihadists' success lays bare Iraq's disintegration and could ignite yet another civil war between Shiites and Sunnis in the country.

A Country Implodes: ISIS Pushes Iraq to the Brink
By SPIEGEL Staff
June 17, 2014 – 05:17 PM

Masoud Ali, a tall, friendly man with a beard and green eyes, was a taxi driver in Mosul until a few days ago. He likes the desert, and he loves his wife and his yellow Nissan. He never paid much attention to politics until now. "Inshallah," he says. Whatever happens is God's will. But then fighters with the "Islamic State in Iraq and Syria," or ISIS, overran the city of two million.

An evening curfew has been in force in Mosul since last Monday, says Ali. He and his family heard gunshots near their apartment on Tuesday, and when Ali looked outside, he saw a dead body lying on the street. Then the rumors began. "They've occupied all government buildings and the airport," said a friend. "The power station and the water works, too," a neighbor added. There were television reports of banks being robbed, the release of thousands of prisoners and the confiscation of oil wells. A day later, Masoud Ali loaded his family into his car and stepped on the gas. As they drove away, they could see police uniforms and abandoned military vehicles in the ditch. Government troops, most of them Sunnis, had surrendered to the Sunni ISIS fighters.

Ali, like most residents of Mosul, is also a Sunni. He had heard the mayor calling for the citizens of Mosul to defend themselves against ISIS. "But why should I have defended myself?" he asks. "For the Shiite government? For Prime Minister Maliki, who oppresses the Sunnis?" He shakes his head. "The conflict has escalated because people in Iraq don't like the government anymore."

Now Ali is standing in a tent outside the city of Erbil in the country's Kurdish north, Iraq's newest refugee camp. It's time for Friday prayer, but instead of resting his forehead on the ground to pray, he presses it against the forehead of a child. His four-month-old son Mohammed is lying on a tarp, surrounded by cans of powdered milk, fresh cucumbers and plastic water bottles. He is crying because he has a fever.