This week the Iraqi cities of Mosul – the second largest city in the country – and Tikrit – Saddam Hussein’s birthplace – fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a terror group that broke away from al-Qaeda. The Guardian reported that some 30,000 Iraqi troops fled an advance of only 800 ISIS fighters. Today, the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk was taken over by Kurdish forces when government forces abandoned their posts in the city. According to reports, ISIS now has its sights set on the capital of Baghdad.
The Tower interviewed Jonathan Spyer, senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, about how these events came about and what it means for the future. Spyer wrote Do ‘Syria,’ ‘Iraq’ and ‘Lebanon’ Still Exist? for the February 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, in which he outlined the flaws of Western policies that insist on preserving the integrity of existing states even in the face of emerging armed ethnic-religious divides that cross national boundaries.
Spyer said that the disintegration of Iraq that is currently being witnessed was not an inevitable outcome of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The Syrian civil war became the focal point for the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict that is now manifesting itself in Iraq. American decisions after Saddam’s fall, however, made matters worse.
The Bush administration’s decision to dismantle the Iraqi army left Iraq incapable of defending itself. This was followed by the Obama administration’s decision to remove American troops from Iraq prematurely, leaving the country unprotected. But it may well be that once harsh and dictatorial rule of one kind or another was removed from Iraq, its disintegration along sectarian and ethnic lines was inevitable.
Spyer concluded, “In the short term, there are no good outcomes to the disintegration of Iraq. A Sunni-Shi’ite war is brewing in which many people, including many innocents will die. It will happen, possibly at the end of it, that new more stable entities will arise – but with the exception of the Kurds of northern Iraq – we are currently far from that point.”
In the September 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine, Spyer also laid out the case for giving the Kurds an independent state in the event of an Iraqi collapse. Read it here.
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