ISIS Rules The Night In Parts Of Iraq

Suspected members of Islamic State at a security screening centre in Kirkuk, Iraq, last October. Photograph: Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

Kimberly Dozier, Daily Beast: In Much of Iraq, ISIS Still Rules the Night

ISIS fighters come back after dark. In many towns Iraqi government control is surface-deep, and ISIS remains the power to be challenged, or joined.

BAGHDAD—Buzz and bustle has returned to the Iraqi capital as a million-plus visitors cram the international book fair, with whole families buying books by the armload, a sign of recovery of Iraq’s reputation as a center for literature and learning, instead of ISIS and car bombs.

Young men sporting multi-colored mohawks rap out beat poetry to flute accompaniment near the historic Qishla clock tower, with a crowd of mostly men nodding in time to the music and smiling at the tale of a soldier who left his love for the front lines only to find that his brother married her in his absence.

And traffic crawls at a near standstill as cars drop off whole families at the glittering but heavily guarded multi-storied Babylon Mall, where a neon-lit fountain beckons visitors to have coffee and shop in peace behind an artfully disguised blast wall.

This is the shiny, happy surface of the post-ISIS campaign that Iraqi, Kurdish and foreign officials tell me is, in fact, painfully fragile, threatened at any moment to be literally blown away.

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WNU Editor: Sectarianism is the fuel that made ISIS rise in Iraq, and it will be sectarianism that will fuel it again if it is not stopped. Unfortunately, as Kimberly Dozier point out in the above post, most Iraqis are more focused on revenge than reconciliation.