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The Shia militias played a key role in "liberating" another mainly Sunni provincial capital, Tikrit, from IS militants at the end of March.

Disgruntled Sunni leaders complain that national resources are being channelled to the Shia militias instead of the state forces.

The brutal tactics, some experts say, may expose Al Qaeda to a Sunni backlash, much as in 2006 and 2007 when Sunni tribes aligned themselves with American forces against the Qaeda extremists.

Ayad Shaker, a police officer in Anbar, said that Al Qaeda had replenished its ranks with a series of prison breakouts, and that the group had also grown stronger because of the limited abilities of Iraqi forces, the conflict in Syria and tensions between Mr. Maliki and the Sunnis.

“I fought Al Qaeda,” he said. “I am sad today when I see them have the highest authority in Anbar, moving and working under the sun without deterrent.”

let’s say by some miracle the Russians defeat ISIS. The only way to keep them defeated is by replacing them with moderate Sunnis. Which moderate Sunnis are going to align with Russia

But to get there we need to size our rhetoric with our interests in Syria as well. Our interests right now are to eliminate or contain the two biggest metastasizing threats: ISIS — whose growth can threaten the islands of decency in the region like Lebanon, the Kurds and Jordan — and the tragedy of Syrian refugees

If we want something better — multisectarian democracy in Syria soon — we would have to go in and build it ourselves. The notion that it would only take arming more Syrian moderates is insane.

Why do we have to search for moderates like a man with a dowsing rod looking for water, and then train them, while no one has to train the jihadists, who flock there? It’s because the jihadists are in the grip of ideals, albeit warped ones. There is no critical mass of Syrian moderates in the grip of ideals; they will fight for their own homes and families, but not for an abstract ideal like democracy. We try to make up for that with military “training,” but it never works.

Everyone wants an immaculate intervention in Syria, one where you look like you’re doing something, but without the political cost of putting troops on the ground or having to make unpleasant compromises with unsavory people. There is no such option.

the fighters were all originally from the Kirkuk area and Hawija.

Islamic State has been pushed in recent months out of places closer to Baghdad, such as Ramadi, Fallujah and Beiji.

Instead, Iraqi forces went straight for the high-profile prize of Mosul.

There is tension between Baghdad and the Kurdistan regional government over the future of the province and whether it will become part of the semiautonomous Kurdistan region.

Sunni Arabs are the majority in Hawija, as well, though it is unclear whether the local population will back the Sunni extremists of Islamic State, who failed to rally residents of Kirkuk to their side in the recent attack.

Hawija is now one of Islamic State’s last remaining hubs for assembling car bombs and roadside explosive devices that have devastated cities and towns throughout Iraq and proved to be the militants’ deadliest weapon against allied Iraqi forces pushing into Mosul, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials.

“It’s like a knife sticking in the side of northern Iraq,”

“We believe the government hurried up to liberate Mosul before Hawija for political reasons,”

“Military plans are being made now about how to liberate Hawija and where the operation will start.”

Gen. Qadr shared photos he said were taken from a dead militant’s tablet computer after the recent Kirkuk assault that showed a GPS-marked trail he took to get to Kirkuk from Mosul. It included a stop in Hawija.

The battle over Falluja has evolved into yet another example of how United States and Iranian interests seemingly converge and clash at the same time in Iraq. Both want to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS

In Syria, where the government of Bashar al-Assad is an enemy, America’s ally is the Kurds.

But in Iraq, where the United States backs the central government, and trains and advises the Iraqi Army, it has been limited by the role of Iran, the most powerful foreign power inside the country.

In an extraordinary statement on Wednesday, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the world’s pre-eminent Shiite religious leader, who lives in Najaf in southern Iraq and is said to be concerned by Iran’s growing role in Iraq, urged security forces and militia to restrain themselves and abide by “the standard behaviors of jihad.”

The United States has thousands of military personnel in Iraq and has trained Iraqi security forces for nearly two years, yet is largely on the sidelines in the battle to retake Falluja. It says its air and artillery strikes have killed dozens of Islamic State fighters, including the group’s Falluja commander.

Militiamen have plastered artillery shells with the name of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a Shiite cleric close to Iran whose execution this year by Saudi Arabia, a Sunni power, deepened the region’s sectarian divide, before firing them at Falluja.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who has stressed that civilians must be protected in the operation and ordered that humanitarian corridors be opened to allow civilians to leave the city safely, disavowed the militia leader’s comments.

She said that some residents had been killed for refusing to fight for the jihadists, and that those inside were surviving on old stacks of rice, a few dates and water from unsafe sources such as drainage ditches.

To allay fears that the battle for Falluja will heighten sectarian tensions, Iraqi officials, including Mr. Abadi, and militia leaders have said they will adhere to a battle plan that calls for the militias not to participate in the assault on the city.

The American military role in Iraq has been limited mostly to airstrikes and the training of the army. But, as in northern Syria, there are also Special Forces soldiers in Iraq, carrying out raids on Islamic State targets.

Iraq’s elite counterterror forces are preparing to lead the assault on Falluja; they have long worked closely with the United States and are considered among the few forces loyal to the country and not to a sect.

A big question going into the battle is whether the Islamic State fighters will dig in and fight or, as they have in some other battles, throw away their weapons and try to melt into the civilian population.

For the United States, there is also the matter of history: Led by the Marines, its forces fought two bloody battles for Falluja in 2004. Mindful of this past, American officials would have preferred that the Iraqis left Falluja alone for now and focused on the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul in the north.

The American military’s assault on Falluja in April of 2004 was in retaliation for an episode that became an early symbol of a war spiraling out of control, the image of it as indelible as it was gruesome: the bodies of four Blackwater contractors dangling from the ironwork of a bridge.

On Jan. 26, Mr. McGurk said, the militant group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, captured about a dozen Iraqi soldiers near Falluja, paraded them through the city in a truck flying the black flag of Al Qaeda, then videotaped their execution the next day.

In 2004, American forces took control of Falluja from insurgent forces at a considerable cost in American lives. After the “surge” of American troops in 2007 and 2008, American officials portrayed the city as something of a success story.

American officials have been pressing the Maliki government to build ties with the tribes by giving them the same benefits that Iraqi soldiers receive and promising to integrate them into the security forces.

Another challenge is a military one. When Mr. Maliki’s forces took Basra in 2008, they did so with the help of American air power. But the Obama administration has not offered to assist the Iraqi forces that are preparing to retake Falluja with American-operated drones or airstrikes.

More than a month after the liberation, there is an undeniably Sunni face to the constellation of armed groups in control of the area, even if Shiite militia commanders still appear to be ultimately calling most of the shots.

Saudi experts note that the rise of younger leaders doesn’t necessarily mean more liberal policies.

The younger generation came of age as the kingdom’s relations with Washington were evolving. For the older generation, the U.S.-led liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi troops in 1991 was a defining moment

Consider Imperial Russia’s claim to be the patron of Orthodox Christendom, a claim mainly targeted at its major regional rival, the Ottoman Empire. Following the Ottoman defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768 to 1774, the Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji allowed Russia to represent Orthodox Christians in Ottoman lands.

The most spectacular efforts to employ the geopolitics of religion were made by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. In 1914, the sheikh al-Islam, who oversaw the empire’s religious affairs, issued five fatwas, translated into numerous languages, urging Muslims in the British, French and Russian empires to revolt.

The politics of religion undermined the Westphalian order, based on the principles of state sovereignty and territorial integrity.

To weaken the order of transnational sectarian protectorates in the region, their underlying conflicts need to be resolved. The clients — Sunni or Shiite — must be sensibly accommodated in their states’ power structures, which will reduce the appeal of foreign patronage.

More important, the international community must prevent any further escalation of the struggle between their main protectors, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

While the Obama administration has focused on confronting the Islamic State militarily, experts say the group’s recent victories point to the need for a political component in the strategy to counter the group — even after nearly 4,000 airstrikes by the American-led coalition and what United States officials say are the deaths of 10,000 ISIS militants.

Sunnis form an aggrieved majority in Syria, where repression of a mostly Sunni uprising by Mr. Assad’s government, backed by Shiite-led Iran, exploded into war.

The legend of the surge has become this era’s equivalent of the legend that America was winning in Vietnam until, in the words of Richard Nixon’s former defense secretary Melvin Laird, “Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975.”

In the late 1970s, the legend of the congressional cutoff—and it was a legend; Congress reduced but never cut off South Vietnam’s aid—spurred the hawkish revival that helped elect Ronald Reagan. As we approach 2016, the legend of the surge is playing a similar role. Which is why it’s so important to understand that the legend is wrong.

The surge was not intended merely to reduce violence. Reducing violence was a means to a larger goal: political reconciliation. Only when Iraq’s Sunni and Shia Arabs and its Kurds all felt represented by the government would the country be safe from civil war. As a senior administration official told journalists the day Bush announced the surge, “The purpose of all this is to get the violence in Baghdad down, get control of the situation and the sectarian violence, because now, without it, the reconciliation that everybody knows in the long term is the key to getting security in the country—the reconciliation will not happen.”

But although the violence went down, the reconciliation never occurred. According to the legend of the surge, Iraq’s collapse stems from Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops at the end of 2011. “If we’d had a residual force of 10,000 to 12,000,” Senator Lindsey Graham said last year, “I am totally convinced there would not have been a rise of al-Qaeda.” In reality, the prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, began persecuting the Sunnis—thus laying the groundwork for their embrace of ISIS—long before American troops departed the country. As early as 2007, writes Emma Sky, who advised both Petraeus and his successor, General Ray Odierno, “the U.S. military was frustrated by what they viewed as the schemes of Maliki and his inner circle to actively sabotage our efforts to draw Sunnis out of the insurgency.”

The tragedy of post-surge Iraq has its roots in America’s failure to make the Iraqi government more inclusive—a failure that began under Bush and deepened under Obama

These errors came well before Obama’s decision to remove American troops at the end of 2011. The fact is, the U.S. failed to stop Maliki’s slide into sectarian tyranny even when it still had 100,000 troops patrolling Iraqi soil. That’s because America had already lost much of its leverage. Once the surge succeeded in reducing violence, Maliki no longer needed American troops to keep him in power

The problem with the legend of the surge is that it reproduces the very hubris that led America into Iraq in the first place. In 2003, the Bush administration believed it could shatter the Iraqi state and then quickly and cheaply construct a new one that was stable, liberal, democratic, and loyal to the United States. By 2006, many conservatives had realized that was a fantasy

in 2007 and 2008, through a series of bold innovations, the United States military bribed, cajoled, and bludgeoned Iraqis into multiple cease-fires. The Iraqi state was still broken; its new ruling elite showed little of the political magnanimity necessary to reconstruct it in an inclusive fashion. And the Band-Aids that Petraeus and his troops had courageously affixed began peeling off almost immediately. Nonetheless, Republicans today say the Iraq War was won, and would have remained won, had the U.S. left 10,000 troops in the country after 2011.

the same wild overestimation of American power that fueled the war in Iraq now fuels the right’s opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran. To hear hawks tell it, the United States can scuttle the current deal, intensify sanctions, threaten war, and—presto—Tehran will capitulate. But Iranians have been living under the threat of attacks from America or Israel for more than a decade now. And British and German diplomats have warned that if the U.S. Congress torpedoes the agreement, sanctions pressure on Iran will go not up but down, as countries that have lost billions by limiting their trade with Tehran stop doing so.

One day, Republicans will resume the painful work they began in 2006—the work of reconciling conservative attitudes with the limits of American power. Let’s hope they don’t do too much damage before that day comes.

Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon called the president’s Iraq policy “absurd” if not “criminal.” George Will, the dean of conservative columnists, deemed neoconservatism a “spectacularly misnamed radicalism” that true conservatives should disdain.

Hezbollah, a Shiite movement, has sent fighters to support the Syrian Army, while Lebanon’s Sunnis largely support the Syrian rebels, and some have shipped them weapons or crossed the border to join them on the battlefield.

It accelerated the tempo of political violence, which is mostly fueled by deep splits between Lebanon’s Sunnis and Shiites that have been inflamed by the civil war in neighboring Syria.

While the neighborhood is residential, Hezbollah dominates the area. Posters of the group’s armed members who have died in battle adorn lampposts, and the group’s media office and construction company are nearby, as is the Lebanon office of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group.

The March 14th coalition, which includes the Future Movement, said in a statement that each victim was “a martyr mourned by all Lebanese.” The head of the Future Movement, Saad Hariri, a former prime minister, said that those killed were victims not only of terrorism, but also of “the involvement in foreign wars, especially the Syrian war.” Although the Future Movement officially disavows the use of violence, some members have smuggled arms to the Syrian rebels, and its leaders have lost ground to hard-line clerics who call for attacks on Hezbollah.

In a video statement last week, a cleric acting as a spokesman for the Abdullah Azzam Brigades said the group would not stop its bombings until Hezbollah withdrew its fighters from Syria and the Lebanese authorities released youths jailed for militant activities.

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said in speeches that the group is fighting in Syria against takfiris, meaning Sunni extremists who consider their opponents infidels. He has called them a threat not just to Shiites, but to the entire region.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned Saudi Arabia on Sunday of "divine revenge" over al-Nimr's death, while Riyadh accused Tehran of supporting "terrorism" in a war of words that threatened to escalate even as the U.S. and the European Union sought to calm the region.

It also illustrated the kingdom's new aggressiveness under King Salman. During his reign, Saudi Arabia has led a coalition fighting Shiite rebels in Yemen and staunchly opposed regional Shiite power Iran, even as Tehran struck a nuclear deal with world powers.

The mass execution of al-Nimr and 46 others - the largest carried out by Saudi Arabia in three and a half decades - laid bare the sectarian divisions gripping the region as demonstrators took to the streets from Bahrain to Pakistan in protest.

Al-Nimr was a central figure in Arab Spring-inspired protests by Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority until his arrest in 2012. He was convicted of terrorism charges but denied advocating violence.

On Saturday, Saudi Arabia put al-Nimr and three other Shiite dissidents to death, along with a number of al-Qaida militants. Al-Nimr's execution drew protests from Shiites around the world, who backed his call for reform and wider political freedom for their sect.

While the split between Sunnis and Shiites dates back to the early days of Islam and disagreements over the successor to Prophet Muhammad, those divisions have only grown as they intertwine with regional politics, with both Iran and Saudi Arabia vying to be the Mideast's top power.

Iran accuses Saudi Arabia of supporting terrorism in part because it backs Syrian rebel groups fighting to oust its embattled ally, President Bashar Assad. Riyadh points to Iran's backing of the Lebanese Hezbollah and other Shiite militant groups in the region as a sign of its support for terrorism. Iran also has backed Shiite rebels in Yemen known as Houthis.

Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard said Saudi Arabia's "medieval act of savagery" would lead to the "downfall" of the country's monarchy. Saudi Arabia's Foreign Ministry said that by condemning the execution, Iran had "revealed its true face represented in support for terrorism."

In Washington, State Department spokesman John Kirby said the Obama administration was aware of the Saudis' severing of ties with Tehran. "We believe that diplomatic engagement and direct conversations remain essential in working through differences and we will continue to urge leaders across the region to take affirmative steps to calm tensions," Kirby said.

Earlier, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini spoke to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif by phone and urged Tehran to "defuse the tensions and protect the Saudi diplomats," according to a statement.

The disruption in relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran may have implications for peace efforts in Syria. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and others spent significant time trying to bring the countries to the negotiating table and they both sat together at talks aimed at finding a diplomatic solution to the civil war. Last month, Saudi Arabia convened a meeting of Syrian opposition figures that was designed to create a delegation to attend peace talks with the Syrian government that are supposed to begin in mid-January.

Iran might have capitalized on global outrage at the executions by Saudi Arabia, but instead it finds itself once again characterized by adversaries as a provocateur in the region and abroad.

The moves formalized the Sunni-Shiite polarization that has fueled the chaotic proxy wars

Now, some Iranians are wondering whether Saudi Arabia has again gained the upper hand in the new diplomatic crisis.

Sheikh Nimr was not only a leading opposition figure in the Saudis’ Sunni kingdom but also a symbol of Shiite activism abroad. After he was sentenced to death by the Saudi judiciary in 2014, Iran warned of “dire consequences” if Sheikh Nimr were to be executed.

The act of cutting ties seems a simple one, but the consequences can be far-reaching.

The Iraqi government and much of its military officer corps are mostly made up of Shi’a Muslims, whereas much of the areas ISIS has retained in Iraq are predominantly Sunni

the Iraqi military forces are often operating in areas where the local population may be more willing to tolerate, or even support ISIS

authorities in the U.S. announced they had arrested an Ohio man and ISIS supporter who planned to bomb the U.S. Capitol.

ISIS primarily focused its attention on its regional ambitions prior to the U.S.-led bombing campaig

One of the gunmen in a dual terror attack in Paris in January 2015 claimed that he was part of ISIS, though the other shooters in that attack were linked to an al Qaeda affiliate.

The U.S.-led coalition against ISIS expanded its aggressive bombing campaign against the group into Syria in September 2014 and has bombarded the terror group virtually daily since.

, Western intelligence agencies are concerned about those who travel to Syria and Iraq to fight with ISIS before coming back home.

Centuries of humiliation and subjugation, first by the Turks, and then by the European powers that carved up the Middle East into its present configuration after World War I, rankle with traditionalists among the faithful. They look back to the Golden Age of Islam, during the Umayyad and Abbassid caliphates, when the Muslim world was the cultural and scientific center of the western world, and Europe a barbaric backwater.

ISIS, however, finds itself in a different situation than al-Qaeda did and has prioritized the creation of a new caliphate over making direct strikes on the western world. 

Conveniently for ISIS, the two modern nations that contain the former capitals of the Umayyad and Abbassid caliphates are in chaos. Iraq, once the seat of the Abbassid world, is still reeling from the Iraq War (2002 - 2011), and its Kurdish, Shi'ite, and Sunni populations threaten to splinter the country into separate states. Meanwhile, the Syrian Civil War rages in neighboring Syria, former home of the Umayyad state.

ISIS has succeeded in seizing a fairly large, contiguous area of Syria and Iraq, where it acts as the government. It imposes taxes, imposes rules on the local people according to its fundamentalist version of law, and even sells oil drilled from the land it controls.

The self-appointed caliph, formerly known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is gathering young militants to his cause with his success in seizing and holding this territory. However, the Islamic State that they are trying to create, with its stonings, beheadings, and public crucifixions of anyone who does not adhere to their exact, radical brand of Islam, does not resemble the enlightened multicultural centers that were the earlier caliphates. If anything, the Islamic State looks more like Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

Even the Mongols, famed for their brutality in conquest, realized the necessity for coexistence. In the 13th century, after creating the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever known, they established the “Pax Mongolica” — the Mongol Peace — that guaranteed religious freedom to all Mongol subjects.

As war has devastated Syria­­­­­­­ in the past nine years, the conflict has taken on an overtly sectarian dimension, and it’s not uncommon for observers to issue fatalistic comments along the lines of K.T. McFarland’s. Sectarian conflict has been said to date back 1,400 years to the founding of Islam, and we frequently hear, as Fox news viewers did this week, that somehow people in the region are irrational, stubbornly embroiled in ancient conflicts and unable to join the modern world. There were sectarian identities in the medieval era, of course, and these sometimes led to conflict. But the intensity of current sectarian cleavages is a surprisingly recent development, effectively beginning with the arrival of European political modernity and only made worse by the post-WWII rise of the authoritarian Arab state. Later, tensions were aggravated by the Lebanese Civil War and by the post-2003 U.S. occupation of Iraq, which remade its sectarian landscape.

Fighting that insurgency cost as much as $2 trillion, according to one estimate, and the lives of nearly 5,000 American troops

And it likely would fall to nascent Iraqi fighters, who just two years ago ditched their weapons and uniforms in Mosul, to repel ISIS and launch a counterinsurgency.

Volesky warned that such attacks in liberated areas are one reason the U.S. is advising the Iraqi and Kurdish forces charged with liberating Mosul to move deliberately. Fas

But there are alternatives. Al Qaeda, for example, has embraced local Sunnis, not terrorized them, allowing the group to return to areas and recruit members.

Iraqi and Kurdish forces are now as far as 20 miles outside Mosul’s city center. The U.S. military has said the operation could last anywhere from weeks to months.

After its defeat, ISIS said the promised apocalyptic battle would come at a later, unspecified date.

A series of attacks last week killed at least 55 people in Baghdad. And in July, at least 324 people died when a truck bomb struck a popular shopping area in central Baghdad, the deadliest attack since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.

But after two years of brutal reign, ISIS may not be able to attract Sunnis to its insurgency. Not after the terror group that robbed their cities, beheaded their citizens, and made crimes of smoking, shaving, and playing music.

But that timetable could shift. In the last week, ISIS has lost a number of key cities in a matter of days. And in those battles, the group appears to be on the defensive before abandoning territory altogether. Most notably, ISIS lost the Syrian city of

And it is possible that ISIS, in taking credit for bombings, is exploiting the frustration of other groups seeking to upend the current Iraqi government.

Or just as likely, the U.S. military is wrong. After all, last year, U.S. commanders forecasted an ISIS expansion in Libya, which instead flailed