Very quietly, Iraq is ceasing to exist

Tuesday, 27 October 2015| http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2015/10/27/Very-quietly-Iraq-has-ceased-to-exist.html

Dr. John C. Hulsman

For the tragic country of Iraq, no news presently is bad news. By that I mean that the headline strategic story at present is that nothing major has changed since ISIS’s stunning advances of last summer. Iraq is now de facto split along organic ethno-religious lines into three very distinct sub-states, roughly corresponding to the old Ottoman Empire sanjak provinces. Worse still for the Abadi government in Baghdad, ISIS is increasingly ensconced as merely another nasty political fact of life in the Middle East; it shows no real signs of going away. Instead, political ossification has set in, making the overturning of this gloomy state of affairs increasingly unlikely.http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2015/10/27/Very-quietly-Iraq-has-ceased-to-exist.html