ISIS is a sectarian Sunni militiathats all. A big one, as militias go, with something like 10,000 fighters. Most of them are Iraqi, a few are Syrian, and a few hundred are those famous European jihadis who draw press attention out of all relation to their negligible combat value. The real strength of ISIS comes from its Chechen fighters, up to a thousand of them. A thousand Chechens is a serious force, and a terrifying one if theyre bearing down on your neighborhood. Chechens are the scariest fighters, pound-for-pound, in the world.
But were still talking about a conventional military force smaller than a division. Thats a real but very limited amount of combat power. What this means is that, no matter how many scare headlines you read, ISIS will never take Baghdad, let alone Shia cities to the south like Karbala. It wont be able to dent the Kurds territory to the north, either. All it can doall it has been doing, by moving into Sunni cities like Mosul and Tikritis to complete the partition of Iraq begun by our dear ex-president Bush in 2003. By crushing Saddams Sunni-led Iraq, the Americans made partition inevitable. In fact, Iraq has been partitioned ever since the invasion; its just been partitioned badly, into two parts instead of the natural three: the Kurdish north, and the remainder occupied by a weak sectarian Shia force going by the name of The Iraqi Army. The center of the country, the so-called Sunni Triangle, had no share in this partition and was under the inept, weak rule of the Shia army.
By occupying the Sunni cities, ISIS has simply made a more rational partition, adding a third part, putting the Sunni Triangle back under Sunni rule. The Shia troops who fled as soon as they heard that the ISIS was on the way seem to have anticipated that the Sunni would claim their own territory someday. Thats why they fled without giving even a pretense of battle.
