Patrick Cockburn reports regularly from the Middle East. His books include
The Jihadis Return and
The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution.
End Times for the Caliphate?
Patrick Cockburn
The war in Syria
and Iraq has produced two new de facto states in the last five years and
enabled a third quasi-state greatly to expand its territory and power.
The two new states, though unrecognised internationally, are stronger
militarily and politically than most members of the UN. One is the
Islamic State, which established its caliphate in eastern Syria and
western Iraq in the summer of 2014 after capturing Mosul and defeating
the Iraqi army. The second is Rojava, as the Syrian Kurds call the area
they gained control of when the Syrian army largely withdrew in 2012,
and which now, thanks to a series of victories over IS, stretches across
northern Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates. In Iraq, the Kurdistan
Regional Government (KRG), already highly autonomous, took advantage of
IS’s destruction of Baghdad’s authority in northern Iraq to expand its
territory by 40 per cent, taking over areas long disputed between itself
and Baghdad, including the Kirkuk oilfields and some mixed Kurdish-Arab
districts.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n05/patrick-cockburn/end-times-for-the-caliphate
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