Can Iraq`s Islamic Militants Be Stopped As they Continue Their March To Baghdad?

Extremists In Iraq Continue March Toward Baghdad -- Karl Vick & Aryn Baker, Time

Militant Sunni forces are taking territory with lightning speed, moving toward the ultimate goal of establishing a new Islamic Caliphate

As Islamist extremists captured Tikrit, a major city in Iraq’s Sunni heartland, just a day after taking Mosul, analysts offered sobering assessments of a fundamentalist militant force whose ambitions may no longer be the stuff of fantasy.

Hardened by years of battle in neighboring Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is routing the forces of a modern nation-state and gathering land with the ultimate goal of establishing an alternate form of governance, an Islamic Caliphate.

Read more ....

My Comment: For ISIS to be as successful as they have been in the past few months .... they needed the local support from the Sunni population .... otherwise they would have just been a fringe group that could only operate in small cells and groups. To mobilize hundreds (if not thousands) of fighters that are heavily armed and eager to take on the U.S. trained Iraqi army .... and to completely rout them .... yup .... the motivation and local/regional support had to be there.

As the fighting and chaos continues to spread .... all sides have now become radicalized .... and I do not see any possibility of a political compromise coming out of this conflict. This is going to be a fight to the finish .... especially since it is now clear that the Sunni Arab population in Iraq has rejected any possibility of being ruled by the Shiite dominated Maliki government in Baghdad. They want their independence .... and they are now taking it by force. And while I do not see ISIS having the means and resources to go into Baghdad`s Shiite slums and to the Shiite dominated south .... they are going to seize all the other territories and from there will start to consolidate their power. I predict that this consolidation of power is going to be a bloody one .... and it would not surprise me if in the weeks to come we will start to hear reports of atrocities and ethnic-religious cleansing as Shiites and other ethnic groups flee out of these ISIS controlled areas. In response .... the Shiite dominated Iraqi government will react forcefully .... and we will then enter into the worst case scenario .... the start of a Sunni - Shiite war.