Iran has sent 2,000 advance troops to Iraq in the past 48 hours to help tackle a jihadist insurgency, a senior Iraqi official has told the Guardian.
The confirmation comes as the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, said Iran was ready to support Iraq from the mortal threat fast spreading through the country, while the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, called on citizens to take up arms in their country's defence.
Addressing the country on Saturday, Maliki said rebels from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) had given "an incentive to the army and to Iraqis to act bravely". His call to arms came after reports surfaced that hundreds of young men were flocking to volunteer centres across Baghdad to join the fight against Isis.
In Iran, Rouhani raised the prospect of Teheran cooperating with its old enemy Washington to defeat the Sunni insurgent group – which is attempting to ignite a sectarian war beyond Iraq's borders.
The Iraqi official said 1,500 basiji forces had crossed the border into the town of Khanaqin, in Diyala province, in central Iraq on Friday, while another 500 had entered the Badra Jassan area in Wasat province overnight. The Guardian confirmed on Friday that Major General Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' elite Quds Force, had arrived in Baghdad to oversee the defence of the capital.
There is growing evidence in Baghdad of Shia militias continuing to reorganise, with some heading to the central city of Samarra, 70 miles (110km) north of the capital, to defend two Shia shrines from Sunni jihadist groups surrounding them.
The volunteers signing up were responding to a call by Iraq's most revered Shia cleric, the Iranian-born grand ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to defend their country after Isis seized Mosul and Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit in a lightning advance this week. Samarra is now the next town in the Islamists' path to Baghdad.
Meanwhile, Iraqi troops had been ordered out of the northern city of Kirkuk by Kurdish fighters who have taken full control of the regional oil hub and surrounding areas, according to a mid-ranking army officer.
His account was corroborated by an Arab tribal sheik and a photographer who witnessed the looting of army bases after troops left and who related similar accounts of the takeover from relatives in the army, the Associated Press reported.
"They said they would defend Kirkuk from the Islamic State [Isis]," said the Arab officer, who oversaw a warehouse in the city's central military base.
"The Kurds have taken advantage of the current situation. They seized Kirkuk and they have other plans to swallow other areas," Mohammed Sadoun said.
Working in secret, European diplomats drew up the borders that have defined the Middle East’s nations for nearly a century — but now civil war, sectarian bloodshed and leadership failures threaten to rip that map apart.
In the decades since independence, Arab governments have held these constructs together, in part by imposing an autocratic hand, despite the sometimes combustible mix of peoples within their borders. But recent history — particularly the three years of Arab Spring turmoil, has unleashed old allegiances and hatreds that run deep and cross borders. The animosity between Shiites and Sunnis, the rival branches of Islam, may be deepest of all.
The unrest is redefining Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Libya — nations born after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Already quasi-states are forming.
For the al-Qaida breakaway group that overran parts of Iraq this week, the border between that country and Syria, where it is also fighting, may as well not even be there. The group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, wants to establish a Shariah-ruled mini-state bridging both countries, in effect uniting a Sunni heartland across the center of the Mideast.
Other potential de facto states are easy to see on the horizon. A Kurdish one in northern Iraq — and perhaps another in northeast Syria. A rump Syrian state based around Damascus, neighboring cities and the Mediterranean coast, the heartland of President Bashar Assad’s minority Alawite sect. A Shiite-dominated Iraq truncated to Baghdad and points south.
Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics, sees an ongoing, violent process to reshape government systems that have been unable to address sectarian and ethnic differences and provide for their publics.
“The current order is in tatters,” he said. “More and more and more people are coming to realize that the system as it is organized, as it is structured, is imploding.”
The Islamic State’s campaign is helped by Sunni discontent with Assad’s Alawite-dominated Syrian government and the Shiite-led government in Iraq, two states whose borders were drawn by Britain and France after World War I.
The militants’ capture of Iraq’s cities of Mosul and Tikrit makes their dream of a new Islamic state look more realistic. It already controlled a swath of eastern Syria along the Euphrates River, with a spottier presence extending further west nearly to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. In Raqqa, the biggest city it holds in Syria, it imposes taxes, rebuilds bridges and enforces the law — its strict version of Shariah.
Iraq’s Kurds, who run an autonomous region in northern Iraq, seized control of the city of Kirkuk, ostensibly to defend it from the militant group’s advance. But they may not want to leave. The ethnically mixed city historically holds a revered status among Kurds and they claim it as their own. Holding it will only further stoke the longtime hopes among many Kurds of declaring outright independence.
Syria’s Kurds, meanwhile, have taken advantage of the turmoil of that country’s civil war — now in its fourth year — to take control of the pocket of northeast Syria where they predominate.
In North Africa, Libya is grappling with its own centripetal forces since the 2011 fall of Moammar Gadhafi. The authority of the central government in Tripoli has collapsed as multiple local militias take power in cities and regions around the country. In the eastern half of Libya — historically a distinct entity centered around Benghazi — there are calls for autonomy.
World powers have no desire to see borders rearranged. The United States and Turkey would both sharply oppose any Kurdish declaration of independence in Iraq, for example, Salem said.
But informal and de facto enclaves are entirely possible. The lines being drawn by Islamic State fighters are “unrecognized but real,” he said. “Taxes are levied, an armed force is in control, there’s just no formalization.”
Gerges said the dissatisfaction over the current order is generating debate over what the new Mideast should look like.
For the Islamic State and other extremists, there should be a caliphate — a ruler implementing Islamic law. Others want the Levant unified as it was under the Ottomans, but under Arab rule. Others dream of something resembling the European Union, he said.
[Note: This is a fascinating article below (as usual from The Daily Bell), and actually longer than the quotes shown, but it was hard to cut many parts of this story just for the sake of brevity, because it is so interesting and germane]
[Also remember the theme "big crisis = big change" and as unsettled as the EU is, we could be seeing beginnings of the evolution of the EU into "big change", as we await the formation of the 10 kings.]
European Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs László Andor has delivered a historic speech calling for a deeper union. It is at least in part a response to recent Euro-elections that showed the EU electorate is fed up with "Europe."
In "European Commission endorses Telegraph view of the euro," Britain's leading anti-EU journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has responded with astonishment:
... I never thought I would live to see a serving European Commissioner suggest that it was "reckless" to launch the euro without a lender-of-last resort or fiscal union to back it up.
Or that EMU policies have led to a vicious cycle and a catastrophic double-dip recession that is entirely due to the dysfunctional character of the project ...
Or that that the internal devaluation policies forced on the victim states are cruel and inherently self defeating.
Or that EMU's stabilisation regime has not come close to putting monetary union on a viable footing, able to command political consent over time. But we have one today from László Andor, and it is a corker, delivered in Berlin of all places.
Well ... it's not just a corker. Andor, like many other Eurocrats, has struggled with the rejection of the EU in recent elections and come up with the predictable solution ... The solution to Euro-fatigue is ... more Europe!
This is a kind of psychosis, and it is a predictable one. Way back in May, 2013, in an article entitled, "Europe's Leaders Fear Revolution," we wrote:
Despite the risks that have been taken – which may well tear the EU apart – the top leaders of the EU press ahead with a determined effort to deepen the EU's political brief.
Pay attention to what they are proposing. The problem of structural unemployment created by the euro is to be combated by extraordinary pan-European measures ...
More people than ever before throughout the West are aware of top-down machinations and increasingly resent them. What comes clear ... is that Eurocrats are aware that patience is running out.
You see? "The problem is to combated by pan-European measures." It's been obvious for years. There is never a single issue that cannot be fixed by more "Europe."
And yet in the recent pan-European parliamentary elections, fed-up voters across Europe sent a different message.
In Britain, the anti-EU party UKIP scored impressive gains. In France, the anti-EU National Front (FN) won the largest number of votes, while Francois Hollande's Socialists fell to third. In Denmark, the anti-immigrant Danish People's Party took about 23 percent of the vote.... The Alternative for Germany (AfD) Euroskeptic party polled 7 per cent in Germany.
Andor's speech shows us once more what the solution will be. And Evans-Pritchard summarizes it pithily:
His proposal – for starters – is a pan-EMU unemployment scheme to act as a fiscal stabiliser and to share the burden of asymmetric shocks ... It implies a full-blown political union under a higher sovereign parliament (or an authoritarian priesthood regime), with both the substance and the machinery of a unitary state. It means that the historic nation states must abolish themselves, becoming linguistic or cultural provinces of a federal union.
Andor is too polite to state the obvious, and so he asks a series of rhetorical questions, but it amounts to a fundamental accusation: EU leaders knew what they were doing when they launched the euro without a fiscal union.
How does he characterize that launch? He calls it "incomplete" and describes it as "reckless." Finally, he loses patience and states the obvious: EU leaders were "far from ignorant" about what they were doing but believed that remedies would be "achieved through legislation and social dialogue."
This will not be reported by the mainstream press as the stunning admission that it is. The top EU elites were more than willing to play God with the fortunes and futures of hundreds of millions of people.
Today, as 10 or 20 years ago, the top men in the EU continue with an experiment that has destroyed wealth throughout Europe, compromised social comity, broken up families and spilled considerable blood. All this is being done in the name of a dubious "union" that is supposed to guarantee that Europe will never go to war with itself again.
Haven't the Eurocrats noticed that Europe is at war with itself right now? It was a most avoidable war, as a matter of fact. Europe was prosperous and peaceful only a quarter-century ago. The euro, which was supposed to cement that prosperity, has in fact shattered it.
That this was BY DESIGN, is a great crime, and one that Europe's top leaders should be accountable for. They knew, before they implemented the euro, that its failure was to be the "leaven" that created pressure for continued social and fiscal integration of their great experiment.
The arrogance is astounding. Yet times are changing; the clever contempt of EU leaders has been punctured by the Internet. It is one thing to plan the demise of European nation-states in private. It is another to see that intention reported for all the world to understand.
Still, the deepening of the EU has long been vaunted. Andors has made it official. The difficulties the EU faces are to be countered by the reality of an ever-closer union.
This is certainly an elite dominant social theme. It will play out against a backdrop of what we call the "Wall Street Party" – a fundamentalmonetary inflation taking place around the world. Most recently, Japan signaled it would participate as well.
The central bankers have reason to inflate. The European experiment is precarious and economies around the world are teetering. Part of Mr. Andors's speech, no doubt, has to do with creating the possibility, rhetorically at least, that the EU, too, can join in the mass inflation building around the world. This no doubt seems the only way out for those who have engineered the current economic cul de sac.
They will print and print until the danger is past and stock markets have traveled through the roof. Wealth is to be destroyed and pensioners bankrupted, but the system itself is to be perpetuated and expanded.
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