Baghdad---A year after the Islamic State group launched a brutally effective offensive, Iraq is struggling to survive as a unified nation, gripped by seemingly endless violence, sectarianism and humanitarian tragedy.
IS began the offensive on June 9, 2014, and overran a third of the country, declaring it and areas in neighbouring Syria a "caliphate" and carrying out atrocities from beheadings and mass executions to enslavement and rape.
The jihadists have been driven out of some areas, but still hold much of western Iraq and remain able to defeat Baghdad's forces and gain new territory despite a year of heavy fighting and some 4,000 strikes carried out in a 10-month US-led air campaign.
The Syrian civil war served as an incubator and training ground for IS, while widespread anger among Iraqi Sunni Arabs, who accused the Shiite-led government of marginalising and targeting their minority community, helped the jihadists succeed.
"The underlying causes of (the) IS rise are still there," said Patrick Skinner, an analyst with the Soufan Group intelligence consultancy.
"And that means IS will remain, perhaps kicked out periodically from place to place but still in the national bloodstream like a septic infection," he said.
IS overran Iraq's second city Mosul in less than 24 hours last year, despite being heavily outnumbered, and has since pushed south with allied militant groups, raising fears that Baghdad itself could fall.
- Militias: solution and problem -
The jihadists swept aside multiple Iraqi divisions, seized thousands of armoured vehicles, weapons and other equipment in a disaster that exposed the full scale of the incompetence and corruption within the security forces.
IS is known for the horrific abuses it has carried out -- including highly-choreographed beheadings recorded on video -- as much as its territorial gains.
In northern Iraq, the jihadists targeted members of the Yazidi faith in a campaign of kidnappings, enslavement and rape that the UN denounced as an "attempt to commit genocide".
And IS massacred hundreds of mostly-Shiite fighters along the Tigris River in Tikrit, killings that ultimately rallied support for Baghdad.
Tens of thousands of people volunteered to fight IS in response to a call from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shiite cleric.
But Iran-backed Shiite militias -- some members of which took part in brutal sectarian violence in past years -- remain the core of what are known as the "popular mobilisation" forces.
They have been essential to gains Baghdad has made against IS, playing a major role in retaking one province and large parts of another, and are loved by many Iraqi Shiites.
But the power of the militias is also a threat to the Iraqi state, which claims to command them but does not control them, and they could also eventually turn on each other.
AFP
