Still lots of fighting left in Sunni-Shia war

The shooting was still going on last week when Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi prematurely declared the battle for Mosul over. He was misled by Iraqi army, police and militia units competing to declare victory first, but now it really is over — and there is little left of Mosul.

The siege began on Oct. 17, so it lasted longer than the Battle of Stalingrad. It probably killed more civilians, too, because the U.S.-led air forces were used to compensate for the shortage of trained and motivated Iraqi ground forces. ISIS snipers were regularly taken out by air strikes that levelled entire buildings.

Life is returning to some of the east-bank suburbs retaken last year, but there is nothing to go back to in the oldest part of the city on the west bank, where ISIS made its last stand. And the level of destruction has been almost as high in a lot of other cities.

The Sunni Arab communities of Iraq and Syria are shattered and scattered. The mixed Sunni-Shia neighbourhoods of Baghdad were mostly “cleansed” of their Sunni residents in the civil war of 2006-08. Even Sunni-majority cities in Iraq that were taken back from ISIS a couple of years ago, like Ramadi and Fallujah, are still largely deserted, with few signs of reconstruction.

Not many of the estimated 900,000 people in refugee camps around Mosul, almost all Sunni Arabs, will be going home soon.

In Syria, the eastern side of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, fell last December after a four-year siege. It now contains a few tens of thousands of people rattling around in the ruins. Raqqa, ISIS’s capital in Syria, will be largely destroyed in the next few months, and after that, Deir-es-Zor.

The calamity that began in 2003, when the U.S. invasion of Iraq overthrew the centuries-long Sunni rule over a mostly Shia country, has reached its final phase. There can be no comeback for the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, who only make up one-fifth of the country’s 36 million people. They have been ruined by their long complicity with Sunni minority rule, first under the Turkish empire, latterly under Sunni tyrants like Saddam Hussein, and finally by their reluctant, desperate support for ISIS. Some, maybe most, will remain in the country, but not as equal citizens.

The Sunni Arabs of Syria will not suffer the same fate, for they are 60 per cent of that country’s population, but their situation is appalling. They were very unwise to throw their lot in with ISIS and al-Qaida and they are paying a heavy price for that mistake.

There’s at least another year’s fighting against ISIS and al-Qaidalinked forces in Syria before reconciliation can begin. There may be much more than a year’s fighting before the Kurds are subjugated again in Syria and Turkey.

They control almost all of the Kurdish-majority parts of northern Syria and many rural areas in southeastern Turkey and even some parts of the Kurdish-majority big cities in the southeast — and bits of them look like Syria’s devastated cities.

As for Iraq’s Kurds, it may prove impossible to put them back in the box. Thanks to the collapse of the Iraqi army three years ago, when ISIS overran much of the country in a fortnight, the Kurdish Regional Government now rules over all the traditionally Kurdish areas of Iraq. It has scheduled a referendum on independence for September.

Iraq’s government will fight that, of course, but unless the United States is willing to bomb the Kurds the way it bombed ISIS, Baghdad is unlikely to win. The Iraqi army couldn’t even have retaken Mosul without the lavish use of U.S. air power.

So there’s lots of fighting left to be done, and lots of opportunities yet for the United States and Russia to stumble into a confrontation.