Onward To Baghdad

"Do not relent against your enemy ... The battle is not yet raging, but it will rage in Baghdad and Karbala."
"Put on your belts and get ready."
ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani

An image grab taken from a propaganda video by the jihadist group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) allegedly shows ISIL militants firing from the back of a vehicle near the central Iraqi city of Tikrit. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

"We do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria, for that matter."
"In our conversation with the Iraqis there will be some short-term immediate things that need to be done militarily and our national security team is looking at all the options."
American President Barack Obama

An image grab taken from a propaganda video by the jihadist group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) allegedly shows ISIL militants near the central Iraqi city of Tikrit. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

The numbers are astonishing, actually. An estimated 7,000 to 10,000 fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, not all that many men of conflict, in fact, and the combined police and military of Iraq felt incapable of meeting them on their own ground and foiling their intention to take over Mosul? This is an Iraqi military and police that has been trained by American conflict specialists, given U.S. heavy weaponry and vehicles and with all those advantages they chose to melt into the background?

Some did just that, hurriedly shedding their uniforms to exchange them for civilian garb enabling them to melt into the hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing the presence of the ISIS terrorists. Given the atrocities that the Islamist fanatics are infamous for, the conspicuous brutality of a particularly heinous variety, it is hardly surprising that unarmed civilians, women and children, flee in panic toward safe haven in Kurdistan. But the police? The Iraqi military?

There have been instances where eyewitnesses claim they watched while members of the military simply handed over their weapons to the Islamists, then walked away, obviously forgiven for they had obeyed the ISIS injunction to 'repent'.

Watching his military evaporate and leave Mosul to the Islamists, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- whose Shia-centric government deliberately left Iraqi Sunnis out of the governing equation is responsible for Sunni Iraq passively aligning itself with ISIS -- has called upon Shia militias to arise and protect Baghdad.

"The unleashing of the Shia militais was a driver of the civil war. The question is, will Maliki try to maintain order over these militias or will the level of conflict spiral into something deeper?" questioned Julien Barnes-Dacey, senior Middle East and North African analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Thousands of people are believed to have fled Mosul – many to nearby Iraqi Kurdistan where temporary camps have been set up. Photograph: Jawdat/Barcroft Media

Kurdish security forces have moved to fill the power vacuum in northern Iraq with the departure of the Iraqi military. The peshmerga have taken over an airbase and additional posts abandoned in the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk. While  Saddam Hussein-era Sunnis take their revenge on the government's political paralysis.

Prime Minister al-Maliki had asked that a state of emergency be declared, giving him and his Shiite-led government powers to run the country, but parliament failed to assemble a quorum.
Nothing, then, to be concerned about. ISIL may have its dreams of creating an Islamic emirate spanning Iraq and Syria, but the Iraqi parliament is blase?

Only the international community looking in from afar is rattled? The UN Security Council has met to emphasize growing international concern over the unanticipated advance by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Nouri al-Maliki who couldn't see the backs of departing U.S. military fast enough, is now pleading for them to return.

As for Britain and France, they have declared it was high time Iraqi authorities dealt with their own problems of degrading security and terrorist groups moving in. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov couldn't resist the opportunity to do a little prickling and prodding by observing the rapid advance b the Islamists as ample proof the invasion of Iraq was ill considered, to say the very least.

President Hassan Rouhani spoke of ISIL as "barbaric". Iran has dispatched troops of its battle-ready Republic Guard into Iraq to help out a Shiite partner. With the United States contemplating its options, other than returning American soldiers to Iraq, the prospect of the U.S. working in tandem with Iran to aid Iraq in dispelling the presence of ISIS on its soil presents an interesting picture of odd cooperation where circumstances make for strange bedfellows.