Is Iraq Finished?

Shiite fighters on the southern edge of Tikrit, Iraq, on March 12. Despite advances by Shiite militias and government forces on Tikrit, most of Iraq’s Sunni belt—including the country’s second-largest city, Mosul—remains under Islamic State’s sway. Photo: Reuters

Emma Sky, The Atlantic: 'Iraq Is Finished'

Tribal leaders reflect on the enemy destroying their country from within.

One afternoon this March, during a visit to Jordan, I sat on the banks of the Dead Sea with my Iraqi friend, Azzam Alwash. As we stared across the salt lake and watched the sun disappear behind the rocky crags of Israel, I recounted a trip I had taken to Jordan 20 years earlier to conduct field research on Palestinian refugees, as part of a Middle East peace effort designed to ensure that within a decade nobody in the region considered himself a refugee.

No one had an inkling back then that the numbers of refugees in the region would increase exponentially, with millions of Iraqis and Syrians displaced from their homes by international intervention and civil war. Nor had I imagined at the time that I would find myself in Iraq after the invasion of 2003, initially as a British representative of the Coalition Provisional Authority—the international transitional government that ran the country for about a year after the fall of Saddam Hussein—and then as the political advisor to U.S. Army General Raymond Odierno when he commanded U.S. forces in the country.

A number of the Iraqis I had gotten to know over the last decade had relocated to Jordan. I had gone there to see them and better understand events in the region—and the conditions that had led to the rise of the Islamic State.

WNU Editor: A sad and sobering essay .... and yes .... Iraq as we have know it is finished .... and I would also add Syria.

Update: Here is another essay on the intractable problems that face Iraq .... After Minority Rule, Iraq’s Sunnis Refuse Minority Role (Yaroslav Trofimov, WSJ).