Free The Rise of Islamic State by Patrick Cockburn

saying, “Iran will apply all its efforts on the international and regional levels to confront terrorism.” With a long border in common, Iraq is Iran’s most important ally, more important even than Syria. The Iranians were horrified by the sudden Iraqi military collapse, which created problems for Iran in Syria, where it had been struggling with some success to stabilize the rule of President Assad. Responding to the surge of ISIS control in Iraq in 2014, a cadre of advisers from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was believed to be putting together a new military force drawn from the army and militias.
    Iraq has long suspected the hidden hand of Wahhabism, the variant of Islam espoused by Saudi Arabia, as beingbehind much of its troubles. In March 2014, Prime Minister Maliki, during an interview with France 24 television, put the blame squarely on Saudi Arabia and Qatar for the rise of Sunni violence in his country, saying that “these two countries are primarily responsible for the sectarian, terrorist and security crisis in Iraq.”
    He added that allegations that he was marginalizing Sunnis were broadcast by “sectarians with ties to foreign agendas, with Saudi and Qatari incitement.” His accusations were angry and direct, alleging that Riyadh and Doha were providing support for the militants, including “buying weapons for the benefit of these terrorist organizations.”
    There was considerable truth in Maliki’s charges. A proportion of aid from the Gulf destined for the armed opposition in Syria undoubtedly goes to jihadist militants in Iraq. Turkey allows weapons and jihadist volunteers, many of them potential suicide bombers, to cross its 510-mile-long border into Syria. Inevitably some of the guns, fighters, and bombers go to Iraq. This is hardly surprising given that ISIS operates in both countries as if they were one.
    Over the past two years, violence has increased sharply, with nearly 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed in 2013 and almost 5,000 in just the first five months of 2014,according to Iraq Body Count. A senior US administration official, speaking in August 2013 and quoted by Jessica D. Lewis of the Institute for the Study of War, said: “We’ve had an average of about five to ten suicide bombers a month … We’ve seen over the [past] ninety days the suicide bomber numbers approach about thirty a month, and we still suspect that most of them are coming in from Syria.”
    A blind spot for the US and other Western powers has been their failure to see that by supporting the armed uprising in Syria, they would inevitably destabilize Iraq and provoke a new round of its sectarian civil war. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, as it was then known, was at its lowest ebb in 2010. It had been vigorously pursued by the Americans and was under attack from the Sahwa or “Awakening” groups of anti–al-Qaeda fighters, mostly drawn from the Sunni tribes. It had lost many of its veterans, who were dead or in prison, and survivors were unpopular among ordinary Sunnis because of their general bloodthirstiness, killing even minor government employees who might be Sunni. Above all, it had failed to overthrow the Shia-Kurdish government. Up to 2012, many Sunnis were hopeful of extracting at least some concessions from the government without going back to war.
    The spectacular resurgence of the jihadists in Iraq came through a well-planned campaign, an important element of which was systematic attacks on the prisons. Known as the “Breaking the Walls” campaign, this involved eight separate attacks to free prisoners, culminating in a successful assault on Abu Ghraib and Taji prisons in the summer of 2013 when at least 500 captives, many of them experienced fighters, escaped. The attackers fired one hundred mortar bombs into the jails and used suicide bombers to clear the way as inmates rioted and started fires to confuse the guards.
    Throughout 2013, ISIS attacks on security forces all over Iraq escalated. An assault by