Publication

When the US pulled out of Iraq at the end of 2011, it could hardly hide the fact that its intervention had failed and that it was leaving behind an unstable country. The recent deepening of sectarian and ethnic cleavages, however, must also be seen as a failure of Iraqi politics. A new explosion of violence is no longer off the cards, especially since the regional power struggle between Iran on the one hand and the Sunni Gulf monarchies and Turkey on the other is exacerbating centrifugal forces in Iraq. The crises in Syria and Iraq are increasingly overlapping.