The IS was a US means of exerting that pressure. US Secretary of State John Kerry during his visit to Baghdad on lastJune 23 warned that Iraq was facing "an existential threat."
IUS brinkmanship diplomacy forced al-Maliki to choose between two bad options: Either to accept a de facto secession of western and northern Iraq along the lines of Iraqi Kurdistan or accept conditional US military support. Al-Maliki rejected both options.
The turning point came with the fall of Iraq's second largest city of Mosul to the IS on June 10. Iraqi Kurdistan inclusive, northern and western Iraq, including most of the crossing points into Syria and Jordan in the west, were removed from Bagdad control, some two thirds of the area of Iraq. Al-Maliki was left to fight this sectarian Sunni insurgency by his sectarian Iran-backed Shiite government. This was a non-starter and could only exacerbate a deteriorating situation.
Al- Maliki and Iran were made to understand that no US support was forthcoming to reign in the IS unless he quit, and a less pro-Iran and a more "inclusive" Irqai government was formed.
The creation of the IS as the sectarian Sunni alternative to Iran's ruling allies in Baghdad and Damascus was and still is the US tactic in its strategic endgame. Until the US strategy succeeds in wrestling Baghdad from Iranian influence and back into its fold as a separating wedge between Iran and Syria, the IS will continue to serve US strategy, which so far is working.
"America is using ISIS in three ways: to attack its enemies in the Middle East, to serve as a pretext for U.S. military intervention abroad, and at home to foment a manufactured domestic threat, used to justify the unprecedented expansion of invasive domestic surveillance," Garikai Chengu, a research scholar at Harvard University, wrote in www.counterpunch.org/ on September 19th.
Since the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate early in the twentieth century, western powers did their best to keep Arabs separated from their strategic depth . The Syria-Iran alliance continues to challenge this doctrine.
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