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now has a 600-mile common frontier with the caliphate and might have been an obvious ally for Baghdad, where Kurds make up part of the government. By trying to scapegoat the Kurds, Maliki ensured that the Shia would have no allies in their confrontation with ISIS if it resumed its attack in the direction of Baghdad. As for the Sunni, they were unlikely to be satisfied with regional autonomy for Sunni provinces and a larger share of jobs and oil revenues. Their uprising has been turned into a full counterrevolution that aims to take back power over all of Iraq.
    In the roasting summer days of July, Baghdad had a phony-war atmosphere, like London or Paris in late 1939 or early 1940, and for similar reasons. People had feared an imminent battle for the capital after the fall of Mosul, but it had not happened yet and optimists hoped it would not happen at all. Life was more uncomfortable than it used to be, with only four hours of electricityon some days, but at least war had not yet come to the heart of the city. I went for dinner at the Alwiyah Club in central Baghdad and had difficulty in finding a table. Iraq’s Shia leaders had not grasped that their domination over the Iraqi state, brought about by the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, was finished, and only a Shia rump was left. It ended because of their own incompetence and corruption, and because the Sunni uprising in Syria in 2011 destabilized the sectarian balance of power in Iraq.
    In Syria the ISIS-led Sunni victory in Iraq threatened to break the military stalemate. Assad had been slowly pushing back against a weakening opposition: in Damascus and its outskirts, the Qalamoun Mountains along the Lebanese border, and Homs, government forces had been advancing slowly and were close to encircling the large rebel enclave in Aleppo. But Assad’s combat troops are noticeably thin on the ground, need to avoid heavy casualties, and only have the strength to fight on one front at a time. The government’s tactic is to devastate a rebel-held district with artillery fire and barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, force most of the population to flee, seal off what may now be a sea of ruins, and ultimately force the rebels to surrender. But the arrival of large numbers of well-armed ISIS fighters fresh from recent successes was posing a new anddangerous challenge for Assad. A conspiracy theory much favored by the rest of the Syrian opposition and by Western diplomats, that ISIS and Assad are in league, was shown to be false as ISIS won victories on the battlefield. Likewise in Baghdad the conspiracy theory that ISIS was in league with the Kurds was dramatically blown away when ISIS launched their next surprise attack against Kurdish regions, defeated the peshmerga in Sinjar, forcing the Yazidis to flee, threatening the Kurdish capital Erbil, and provoking the re-entry of the US military into the Iraq war.
    As ISIS became the largest force in the Syrian opposition it presented the West and its regional allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Turkey—with a quandary: their official policy was to get rid of Assad, but ISIS was now the second strongest military force in Syria; if he fell, it was in a good position to fill the vacuum. Like the Shia leaders in Baghdad, the US and its allies responded to the rise of ISIS by descending into fantasy. They pretended they were fostering a “third force” of moderate Syrian rebels to fight both Assad and ISIS, though in private Western diplomats admit that this group doesn’t really exist outside a few beleaguered pockets. Aymenn al-Tamimi confirmed that this Western-backed opposition “is getting weaker and weaker”; he believessupplying them with more weapons won’t make much difference. When US air strikes began the US did tell the Syrian government when and where they would be, but not the “moderate” rebels whom the US was publicly backing. The American military presumably calculated that anything they told the Free Syrian