Iraq crisis: Syria overshadows revival of ISIS

The rise of ISIS in Iraq is the storm that everyone has chosen to ignore while its more melodramatic activities in Syria have caught the headlines.

While Syria was attracting Sunni muslim jihadis from across the world with its message of religious purity, and using their social media savvy to tweet gruesome pictures of beheadings and crucifixions, the organisation's strategists were playing a more conventional political game in neighbouring Iraq.

In doing so, they were able to use both the human and financial resources for which the Syrian "cause" has been been a successful advertisement, particularly from religious sympathisers in the Gulf.

More than in Syria, ISIS in Iraq took care not to alienate local populations. Some of the Sunni tribes who turned on al-Qaeda when it was fighting the Americans eight years ago were by now deeply hostile to the Shia-led government of Nouri al-Maliki.

ISIS could not have seized and held both Fallujah and Ramadi, the major cities of Anbar province which neighbours Syria, without some local support.

There are any number of culprits for how ISIS, previously Islamic State of Iraq, was allowed to expand from the random, if frequent, bombing of police stations and Shia pilgrimage sites to their current dominance of Iraq's Sunni strongholds.

Mr Maliki must certainly take a large share of the blame. He did too little to reach out after his election victory in 2010 to the Sunni minority, and has turned large parts of the Iraqi security forces into a personal fiefdom, whose loyalty is to him and his party, State of Law: in Iraq, a personal fiefdom is inevitably a sectarian one.

Shia militias, flying Shia-only religious flags, have been prominent in the fight against ISIS.

But it is not only him. The sectarian-based electoral and parliamentary system he inherited meant that, given he would get no votes from the Sunni or Kurdish minorities, his main opposition was even more extreme Shia factions.

Then he has also been poorly advised. When America lost interest in Iraq and pulled out, it was inevitable - perhaps it was inevitable anyway - that he would turn to Iran for support instead.

Yet Iran had bigger strategic concerns than Iraq's internal stability, and saw Iraq mostly as a staging post for its defence of the Assad regime, using it to transfer weaponry and as a recruiting ground for its Assad-supporting Shia militias.

Then there is the Syrian conflict itself: the western powers have outsourced management of the rebel cause to proxies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who have proved unwilling or incapable of creating a moderate opposition and suppressing the militants. Eastern Syria is and will remain a buffer zone for ISIS's activities in Iraq, whatever the outcome of the Syrian war in the more heavily populated west of the country.

And finally there is President Bashar al-Assad himself. A decade ago he was encouraging Islamic State of Iraq to recruit in northern Syria, as part of his broader campaign of "resistance" against America in the West. Mr Maliki, now formally his ally, was furious, and cooperation between the two has never been good - one of the many failings that undermined the Syrian regime.

Now he has lost control of his country. For all the talk of a regime victory in the major cities, it will be a long time before he can exert supreme force against the Sunni militants, let alone reach out politically to their support base.

Mr Maliki may now find himself in the same position.