The Ever-Expanding ISIS

Adam Chandler tracks their gains this weekend:

As the Associated Press reports, by wresting control of Rutba, ISIS now runs a strip of a major highway, “a key artery for passengers and goods” heading to and from neighboring Jordan. The capture of al-Qaim, as we noted earlier, has already given ISIS control of a vital border crossing post between Iraq and Syria. ISIS also took the towns of Rawah and Anah, which some fear will lead to the capture of Haditha, home to an important dam that, if destroyed, could cause massive flooding and damage the country’s electrical grid.

Juan Cole sees the fall of Qaim as a potentially explosive development:

The first thing that occurred to me on the fall of Qa’im is that Iran no longer has its land bridge to Lebanon. I suppose it could get much of the way there through Kurdish territory, but ISIS could ambush the convoys when they came into Arab Syria. Since Iran has expended a good deal of treasure and blood to keep Bashar al-Assad in power so as to maintain that land bridge, it surely will not easily accept being blocked by ISIS. Without Iranian shipments of rockets and other munitions, Lebanon’s Hizbullah would rapidly decline in importance, and south Lebanon would be open again to potential Israeli occupation. I’d say, we can expect a Shiite counter-strike to maintain the truck routes to Damascus.

Mona Mahmood relays an account of life in Mosul under ISIS rule:

People are scared an air strike might be launched by Maliki’s forces against Mosul at any moment.

Most of the people who have enough money are heading towards Kurdistan. The situation is secure and calm inside Mosul. The rebels – some of them are masked, others are not – are guarding all the official buildings, including hospitals and banks. You can see the flag of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) flying on most of the buildings in Mosul. There is no Iraqi flag at all.

Ba’athists are in charge now of running the city facilities and official institutions like hospitals, directorates and banks. The new mayor, Hafidh al-Jamas, a former military commander in the time of Saddam Hussein, was installed by the Ba’athists and he is doing his best to make life easy for the people in Mosul by providing fuel, food and by keeping prices low as much as possible. A commander was also installed for Mosul who was a former navy commander in the time of Saddam. His name is Khalid al-Jabin. He was in Syria for many years.

People in the city are circulating rumours that we should be careful of smoking in public, wearing jeans or letting women get out without a veil. But the reality is totally different. You can do and wear whatever you want, the rebels are busy now with their liberation of Iraq, and they do not care what people are doing or wearing.

Another dispatch from the occupied city finds the people happy to have Baghdad off their backs, but leery of what their Jihadist rulers have in store for them:

Mosul’s people still seem reluctant to live as they normally do. Everyone is cautious. A group of people I know arranged to meet in the same café they normally do; it was the first time they had all met up since the city was taken over by the extremists. Although everyone likes football, nobody was talking about the World Cup in Brazil. It was clear that everyone had the same thing on their minds: The city, its unpredictable future and how they would find safe places for their families. They all know things cannot remain the same in Mosul after what has happened here and their conversation was carried on in whispers.

“Let’s smoke a shisha [water pipe] because this may be the last time we can,” one of the friends said. He had heard that ISIS would ban shisha smoking and cigarettes as well as many other things.

Reading similar reports, Max Fisher sees a popular support base forming around ISIS:

Mosul residents told the Financial Times that ISIS sacked alcohol shops and tore down a church that was under construction, but that otherwise personal freedoms have been unchanged. Their one complaint was the lack of electricity, which they blamed on the central Iraqi government, and said they were cheering on ISIS to seize a nearby refinery to fix the issue.

The trick that ISIS has pulled off here is seizing Mosul but not ruling it directly. The group appears to have handed authority for the large city over to local, tribal, Sunni armed groups. Those groups share ISIS’s hatred of the Iraqi national government, so they’re happy to help oust the Iraqi army, but unlike ISIS they are not as fixated on imposing extremist Islamism. “There is no ISIS in Mosul,” a 58-year-old Mosul resident told the Financial Times. “The ones controlling city are now the clans. The power is with the tribes.”

Meanwhile, in Baghdad, support for Maliki weakens:

Mr Maliki seems to want to fight Isis without help from the Sunnis, tarring all of them with the same brush of complicity. That there has been some complicity is clear. Some rump Ba’athists and some tribal leaders joined Isis, or at least stepped aside. Sunnis have been provoked but they also have a lot of explaining to do. But this is still a deeply counter-productive approach. The Iraqi prime minister should be seeking to get more Sunni Arabs and Kurds on the government side on the battlefield.

Yet the frigid line up earlier this week when Shia and Sunni political leaders gathered to make a joint call for Iraqi unity told another story. After the photocall, the prime minister and the Sunnis drifted off without a word to each other.

To make matters worse for Maliki, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s leading Shia authority, is calling for a new government:

Although he avoided directly criticising the Iraqi prime minister, Sistani’s call is far short of the resounding support Maliki needs to overcome rising unease at home over his leadership as well as rapidly shrinking international support.

Sistani also renewed a demand he made last week for his followers, who comprise the majority of Iraq’s dominant Shia sect, to fight the jihadist group Isis and its insurgency that continues to ravage north and central Iraq. “They must be fought and expelled from Iraq, [or] everyone will regret it tomorrow, when regret has no meaning,” Sistani’s spokesman announced during Friday prayers in Najaf.

With ISIS bearing down on Baghdad, Martin Chulov observes the rearming of the city and the re-emergence of the notorious Mahdi army:

Up to 20,000 men, many of whom quit jobs last week to join the militia, responded to the call to arms from al-Sadr and [Sistani]. … On Baghdad’s streets, battered pickups shuttled weapons from depots to mosques where the rapid rearming has transformed the already militarised capital into a war zone in waiting. With the mobilisation complete, the now battle-ready militia presented itself to Iraqis once more on Saturday, staging a series of parades in Baghdad and the south that made an emphatic statement of its readiness and intentions.

One of the most feared names in Iraq was back in business, even if it was fighting under a different banner. This time around, the Mahdi army will be called the Peace Brigades, after its leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, decided that a rebranding might shake it free from its infamous past.

But military marches are hardly peace offerings. And the rally through the Sadrist heartland of Sadr City was no different. Columns of fighters carrying rifles, trucks laden with rockets and men in white wearing mock suicide vests were on the move through the former slum-turned-battlefield soon after sunrise in a futile attempt to beat the blazing midsummer heat.