The Objective

"The objective would be to keep Iraqi security forces off balance, tying them down on passive security duties, as well as to erode (the government's) presence and its ability to sustain services."
Zaineb al-Assam, Middle East analyst, IHS Country Risk

Warlord Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has seized control of another Iraqi provincial capital just a day of gaining power in the country's second biggest city Mosul. Pictured: A propaganda video uploaded by jihadist group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant today, which allegedly shows ISIL militants gathering at an undisclosed location in Iraq's Nineveh province

Saddam Hussein may have been a monster, a pitiless tyrant enabling a Sunni minority to take power over a Shia majority in Iraq, but he did maintain order within the country, swiftly settling by whichever brutal means were required, any controversies or attempts at tribal or sectarian or ethnic rebellion. His Baathist regime, Sunni in its colouration, was a counterpart to the Alawite Baathist regime of Syria's Bashar al-Assad.

Saddam Hussein is gone, ingloriously captured in his spidey-hole by American troops, and capital punishment was his fate, not quite in as horrific a manner as the capital punishment by mutilation leading to death that was the fate of Libya's Moammar Ghadafi, but the end result of removing each of those dictators was a societal break-down. Each of them supported terror and terrorism as long as it steered clear of their own territories. Now that they're gone, their countries are mired in Islamist terrorism.

And one might just as well include Syria in that equation. Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, like his father before him Hafez al-Assad, is a feared, brutal tyrant for whom no punishment is swift enough, wide enough, deep enough and suffijciently malevolent whether directed against civilians, or children, to compensate for the lack of respect to his regime. He has resorted to bombing and shelling his own civilians, creating a vast legion of frightened refugees. He has used starvation, chemical weapons, barrel bombs, torture and slaughter of all varieties to put down the rebellion of Syria's Sunnis against the minority, ruling Alawite Shias. He warned from the outset that "terrorists" were behind the move to rout him from power. And so did Moammar Ghadafi.

As for Saddam Hussein, perhaps no one thought to ask him what would come along in his absence. Chaos did, even when the Coalition of the Willing had their countless troops in his land, incapable of preventing the butchery of secular animus that motivated Sunni and Shia to attack and slaughter one another. Finally, the United States encouraged Syrian Sunnis, disgusted at the bestiality of al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq, to fight back, training and arming them for that purpose. But when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki prevailed upon U.S. forces to leave, and the U.S. attempted to prevail upon the mostly Shia military to incorporate the Northern Awakening militias into the national military, they didn't succeed. Ultimately, Prime Minister al-Maliki accused his Sunni President of terrorism and alienated his Sunni constituency.

Now, he reaps what he had sown. The Iraqi Sunni minority has no interest in aiding a Shia-led-and-exclusive government, even with the minority Kurds maintaining their position in government, as a stable partner whose own militias can be depended upon to defend Iraq where the largely Shia national military cannot. But the Kurdish peshmerga cannot prevail entirely on its own, other than to defend their own corner of the country, Kurdistan.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is now well on its way to producing its long-awaited Islamist religious empire, the reenacted caliphate of yore. It has established sound footholds in parts of Syria, and now it has taken Mosul, the second-largest and most important production-and-economic-hub city in Iraq, and has gone on to Tikrit and Kirkuk with its gas fields where it will meet the peshmerga in combat, and moves as well toward Baghdad.

In Mosul, the Iraqi Sunni military melted away, leaving the American-supplied weaponry and military vehicles to the black-clad Islamists whose fearsome reputation and kidnappings and executions exploded into an exodus of over half a million people across the country's north, anxious to escape the assault. Some initial skirmishes between ISIL fighters and the military led to the latter fleeing. And leaving the Sunni insurgents in possession of all the arms found in Mosul's armouries. Which is why they now drive Humvees and other U.S.-supplied vehicles. And they're not wanting for funding, having helped themselves to a reputed half-billion from Mosul's central bank.

This all comes latterly courtesy of President Barack Obama who was anxious to free himself and his military from responsibility in Syria and Iraq, even if a previous administration was responsible for leaving Iraq free to destroy itself. When Russian President Vladimir Putin surprised himself by persuading President Obama that the better course of Laureate action was to pursue diplomacy over military involvement in Syria, he estimated that Crimea could be his without much reaction, just as the Islamist zealots took their own lesson from American threats being casually unfulfilled, freeing them from fear of repercussions.

An empire, of course, is not just built upon a limited conquered geography. It is but a start, that must be built upon to gradually achieve larger proportions, dominating greater and greater proportions of geography until it encompasses what can be truly termed an "empire". That empire is meant to grow exponentially, and to include, eventually, geography far removed from the Middle East, North Africa and South and Central Asia. And, going on from there, Europe, and North America and South America, and wherever else the Islamist foothold becomes a holding.