The Rise of Islamic State Read Online Free Page B

towards Baghdad” before the Shia could recover.
    I arrived in Baghdad on June 16, when people were still in a state of shock following the collapse of the army. People could not quite believe that the period starting in 2005 when the Shia tried to dominate Iraq, as the Sunni had done under Saddam Hussein and the monarchy, was suddenly over. The disaster from their point of view was so unexpected and inexplicable that any other calamity seemed possible. The capital should have been secure: it had a Shia majority and was defended by the remains of the regular army, as well as tens of thousands of Shia militiamen. But then almost the same might have been said of Mosul and Tikrit.
    The government’s first reaction to defeat was disbelief and panic. Maliki blamed the fall of Mosul on a deepconspiracy, though he never identified the conspirators. He looked both baffled and defiant, but appeared to feel no personal responsibility for defeat—despite having personally appointed all fifteen of the army’s divisional commanders.
    In the first days after the fall of Mosul there was a sense of half-suppressed hysteria in the empty streets: people stayed at home, frightened, to follow the latest news on television. Many had stocked up on food and fuel within hours of hearing about the army’s collapse. Sweetshops and bakeries make special pasties for breaking the fast at the end of the day during Ramadan, but few people were buying them. Weddings were cancelled. Rumors swept the city that ISIS was planning to make a sudden lunge into the center of Baghdad and storm the Green Zone, in spite of its immense fortifications. A Baghdad newspaper reported that no fewer than seven ministers and forty-two MPs had taken refuge in Jordan along with their families.
    The biggest fear was that ISIS fighters, only an hour’s drive away in Tikrit and Fallujah, would time their attack to coincide with an uprising in the capital’s Sunni enclaves. The Sunni in Baghdad, though buoyed by the news of the fall of Sunni provinces to the insurgents, were afraid that the Shia would be tempted to carry outa pre-emptive massacre of the Sunni minority in the city as a potential fifth column. Sunni strongholds, like Adhamiya on the east bank of the Tigris, appeared to be deserted.
    For example, I tried to hire a driver recommended by a friend. He told me he needed the money but he was a Sunni, and the risk of being stopped at a checkpoint was too great. “I am so frightened,” he said, “that I always stay at home after six in the evening.” It was easy to see what he meant. Sinister-looking men in civilian clothes, who might be from government intelligence or from the Shia militias, had suddenly appeared at police and army checkpoints, picking out suspects. These new plain-clothed officers were clearly in a position to give orders to the policemen and soldiers.
    Sunni office workers asked to go home early to avoid being arrested; others stopped going to work. Being detained at a checkpoint carries an extra charge of fear in Baghdad because everybody, particularly the Sunni, remembers what it led to during the sectarian civil war of 2006–7: many of the checkpoints were run by death squads and the wrong ID card meant inevitable execution. Press reports claimed the killers were “men dressed as policemen,” but everybody in Baghdad knows that policemen and militiamen are often interchangeable.
    There was nothing paranoid or irrational about the ever-present sense of threat. Iraq’s acting national security adviser, Safa Hussein, told me that “many people think” ISIS will “synchronize attacks from inside and outside Baghdad.” He believed such an assault was possible, though he thought it would lead to defeat for ISIS and the Sunni rebels who joined them. The Sunni are in a minority, but it wouldn’t take much for an attacking force coming from the Sunni heartlands in Anbar province to link up with districts in the city such as Amariya. For ISIS,