Uhm, don't look now but Iraq seriously seems to be coming apart...
by digby
I officially no longer give a damn about David Brat. I'm sure I will again, but for the moment this seems a little bit more important:
Sunni militants extended their control over parts of northern and western Iraq on Wednesday as Iraqi government forces crumbled in disarray. The militants overran the city of Tikrit, seized facilities in the strategic oil refining town of Baiji, and threatened an important Shiite shrine in Samarra as they moved south toward Baghdad.
The remarkably rapid advance of the Sunni militants, who on Tuesday seized the northern city of Mosul as Iraqi forces fled or surrendered, reflects the spillover of the Sunni insurgency in Syria and the inability of Iraq’s Shiite-led government to pacify the country after American forces departed in 2011 following eight years of war and occupation.
By late Wednesday, witnesses in Samarra, 70 miles north of Baghdad, were reporting that the militants, many of them aligned with the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS, were on the outskirts of the city. They said the militants demanded that forces loyal to the government leave the city or a sacred Shiite shrine there would be destroyed. Samarra is known for the shrine, the al-Askari Mosque, which was severely damaged in a 2006 bombing during the height of the American-led occupation. That event touched off sectarian mayhem between the country’s Sunni Arab minority and its Shiite majority.
This live-blog of the day's events will wake you up.
I don't know what to say. I suppose we all figured this would be the likely end game. Certainly it seemed more likely than the Jeffersonian democracy bilge they tried to sell us on a decade ago. But what in the hell is going to happen now?
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