Even as the countdown to select a new Iraqi leadership began this week, doubts remained about whether a new government would be able to turn the beleaguered nation away from the abyss which threatens the country’s very existence.

Iraq continues to grapple with the scale of a military victory by jihadist-backed Sunni rebels who have overrun cities and captured huge swathes of land and the Kurdistan Region’s stated intention to break away from Iraq after it grabbed vast territories and energy resources.

Leaders of the country’s divided ethno-sectarian factions have begun the process of forming a new government following the 30 April inconclusive elections which they hope will end the political stalemate that has frozen decision-making.

On 15 July, the parliament elected a new speaker. Under Iraq’s constitution the parliament has two weeks to choose a president who then has four weeks to nominate a prime minister. By an unwritten understanding, a Sunni holds the position of speaker, a Kurd has the presidency, and a Shia is prime minister.

In theory, with some horse-trading and allotment of cabinet portfolios and government jobs, this should give Iraq its best chance to break the deadlock and start a new political process which is hoped will stop the country’s collapse.

Yet, many Iraqis are cautious about predicting any radical change in the policies of any new government that comes to power in Baghdad. Government is at the heart of Iraq’s failure, and the two elected governments since the fall of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003, always dominated by Shia politicians, have had rotten sectarian agendas.

The ouster of Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime in the US-led war empowered the long-oppressed Shia majority, upending the nation’s sectarian balance and marginalising the Sunni community. Ethnic Kurds emerged as the winners with an autonomous region and an equal share in power and resources, thanks to the federal status bestowed on the enclave.

As part of this process, Iraq’s main rival groups have been so entrenched behind their maximal goals that they have refused to make concessions on power and resource-sharing that could stabilise the fragile country.

Having long being marginalised by successive Iraqi governments, the majority Shia community has been determined to maintain control of the government, security forces and national wealth.

Since Saddam’s downfall, the Shias have feared the Sunnis would continue to view them as weak and incompetent and likely to be overwhelmed by one major defeat. The Kurds have never been satisfied by the semi-independent region enshrined in Iraq’s post-Saddam federal constitution. They want to achieve their historic ambitions of statehood by taking advantage of the country’s troubles.

After they took control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and some 40,000 extra km of land outside their northern enclave last month, they have felt stronger and closer to achieving their national enterprise.

The Kurds have made drastic demographic and political changes on the ground in the territories they control that will make life for Arabs and Turkmens more difficult. Like minorities in the Sunni rebel-controlled areas, non-Kurdish communities, such as Christians, Yazidis, Shabaks and Turkmens, now fear that because of the de facto Kurdish supremacy they will be powerless if the Kurdish Regional Government decides to impose a solution.

The Kurdish leadership is already making plans for a referendum on independence and its participation in the new government would only be symbolic, proving the Kurds’ point that the Baghdad government is a failure.

Sunni politicians are, meanwhile, left in an awkward situation. Most of the Sunni towns are now under rebel control and Sunni lawmakers seem to be out of touch with their constituencies.

After the takeover of their areas, Sunni tribal and insurgent groups have made common cause with the terror group, the Islamic State (IS), to topple the Shia-led government. The IS and its allies are carrying out large-scale atrocities, including summary executions and extrajudicial killings of prisoners and detainees, and they are damaging livelihoods and property, making communal coexistence impossible.

Most Christians, Shia and Turkmens in Mosul and other areas which fell to the Sunni rebels have abandoned their homes and belongings and fled in terror after IS militants enforced Sharia, or Islamic Law.

On the other hand, Iraq’s communities are politically divided and there are tensions within their ranks that have already led to infighting. Many Shia refuse to grant Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s demand for a third term.

Many, including members of his own Shia alliance that comfortably won the April elections, now see Al-Maliki’s departure as essential to national reconciliation efforts. The Kurdish leadership also seems to lack consensus on many national issues, including the best timing for declaring Kurdish independence. Leaders of Kurdistan’s second largest party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, are less enthusiastic than Barzani’s Democratic Party of breaking up with Iraq.

The Sunnis are divided too. Fighting has already broken out between Sunni rebel factions. Few believe a compromise is possible between jihadists seeking to establish an Islamic caliphate and secular members of Saddam’s former Baath Party.

Last week, Sunni leaders in exile who met in Jordan vowed to topple the Shia government through a “legitimate revolt.” Around 300 Sunni clerics, tribal leaders, insurgent commanders and businessmen also hailed the Islamist uprising led by IS militants, portraying the violence as a fight-back against an oppressive Shia-led government.

The key question, therefore, is whether any new government will be able to meet these and other challenges, or whether it will simply reproduce Iraq’s chronic confessional problems. So far there seems to be no solution to Iraq’s ethno-sectarian conflict. There is hardly any doubt that Iraqi security forces will be able to restore normalcy and stability in the Sunni cities overrun by the rebels even if Iraq’s army would be able to roll back militant gains.

A US military assessment of Iraq’s security forces has concluded that the army and the police are incapable of protecting civilians and that many units are deeply infiltrated by either Sunni extremist informants or Shia personnel backed by Iran.

Last week, scores of women were slaughtered in an apartment in Baghdad, allegedly for being prostitutes. The local and international media reported that the mass killing was carried out by gunmen belonging to a Shia militia working as a moral police force to enforce an Islamic code of conduct under the nose of the regular police. Such crimes, whose perpetrators often go unpunished, pose a threat to Iraq’s precarious stability.

With ambitious efforts to end Iraq’s quagmire now often seen as a fool’s errand, and as the country remains divided with half of it already out of the government’s control, the question remains if Iraq can be saved.

In other circumstances, an inclusive government, as some have been suggesting, could work. But conditions to deliver successes for such a government do not exist in Iraq. As the experiences of the last two partnership governments have showed, Iraq’s confessional power-sharing system is fraudulent in its current form, as it weakens the state, fragments the nation, and introduces a cycle of clientelism and corruption which hinders nation-building.

Some have been suggesting “soft partitioning” as the only realistic solution to leading Iraq to safety. Establishing a new political system of three loosely confederated entities for Shias, Sunnis and Kurds, they argue, would stop Iraq’s turbulent collapse.

Yet, with a history of deep mistrust and so much bloodshed and bigotry, even a negotiated partitioning could be out of reach, at least for the foreseeable future.

In short, Iraq seems to be doomed for to a long period of Somalization, a process unleashed by the US-led invasion in 2003, that will break up the country while preventing its chaotic spill-over into neighbouring countries.

The Iraqi Kurds have also withdrawn their ministers from the national coalition government, severing their only remaining political ties with the Baghdad government and capping their struggle with the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi leadership to reestablish themselves as a free nation.

In a fresh sign of a breach with Baghdad, the Kurdistan Region has reportedly now started printing its own national currency to be used in Kurdistan once the enclave is officially declared a separate state.

By any standards, these measures demonstrate that the Kurdish moment has finally arrived and the long-awaited dream of setting up an independent Kurdish state is becoming a reality.

Yet, there are still tremendous doubts as to whether the Kurdish goal is achievable and sustainable.

The escalation comes amid fears that Iraq will head further towards chaos if leaders of the country’s divided communities do not soon make progress towards naming a new government following the 30 April elections.

Iraq’s parliament failed this week to reach an agreement on who would be the country’s next president and prime minister.

The Kurds have already seized the oil-rich province of Kirkuk in addition to vast territories in three provinces, nearly doubling the size of the land they have controlled in their self-ruled region since 1991 when the United States and Britain imposed a no-fly zone to protect them from the army of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

With Kurdish regional president Masoud Barzani calling on the Kurdish parliament to prepare a referendum on independence, the vigorous new acts have put into perspective the Kurdish strategy of breaking away from Iraq by exploiting the country’s woes and whenever possible triggering a larger national conflict.

A closer look at this approach, however, reveals that the Kurds are using Iraq’s political chess game to capitalise on their opponents in Baghdad by imposing their rules for the endgame.

This strategy is clearly backed by cunning tactical and long-term planning to exploit post-Saddam conflicts to push the independence scheme forward.

In the latest phase of the recent crisis, Kurdish ministers said they were boycotting the national government after Shia prime minister Nuri al-Maliki condemned the Kurdish Regional Government in Arbil for allegedly giving refuge to “Islamic State extremists” and Baathists.

When al-Maliki named his deputy, Hussein al- Shahristani, to serve as acting foreign minister in place of Hoshyar Zebari, one of the Kurdish ministers walking out of the cabinet, the Kurds seized two oil-production facilities in Kirkuk province and expelled the Arab staff while keeping the employees of Kurdish and Turkman ethnicities.

The two fields are among the main wells producing oil in Iraq, which now produces 400,000 barrels a day.

Last month, the Kurds sent their troops in to capture Kirkuk and vast amounts of land in three provinces that they claim are part of their autonomous region. The moves came following the collapse of the Iraqi army after Sunni rebels led by Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIS) militants seized large swathes of territory.

Like in any tug of war that aims at capturing hearts and minds and diverting attention away from a drive to seize land and resources, the Kurds have tried to justify their moves by putting the blame squarely on al-Maliki and inflating his mistakes.

When they seized Kirkuk, the Kurds’ pretext was to fill a security vacuum after the Iraqi army had abandoned its posts, and when they seized the oil fields they were acting pre-emptively to stop the government from destroying the installations, they said.

Zebari was removed from his post by al-Maliki and did not walk out in protest against the prime minister’s remarks as he had claimed, demanding an apology from al-Maliki.

On Sunday, Kurdish lawmakers stayed in Arbil and did not attend a parliamentary session scheduled to name new leaders who could help to hold the nation together and confront the Sunni onslaught that has overrun much of the country.

They claimed that an Iraqi Airways plane which should have carried them to Baghdad had remained grounded by the capital’s aviation authority.

The Kurds may be trying to make a case for their statehood, but such moves raise the question as to whether they are using cloak-and-dagger diversionary tactics in order to put al-Maliki and the Shia leadership in the dock while taking the aggressive steps needed to jump-start their project of a national homeland.

The approach of holding al-Maliki responsible for Iraq’s current crisis is a foregone conclusion. The Kurds have also long complained that they are the “victims” of the Arabs and the central government in Baghdad.

What is important this time round, however, is the timing of the triggering of the stand-off, which has seemed to be determined by political expediency as Iraq has gone up in flames.

The Kurdish strategy for post-Saddam Iraq was to keep the central government in Baghdad weak. During discussions with the Pentagon on the role of the Iraqi army before the US-led invasion in 2003, Kurdish leaders insisted on a small and a lightly armed defense force following Saddam’s fall.

Later, they pushed the US occupation authorities to dissolve the Iraqi army and snubbed attempts to provide the new army with sophisticated weapons. The pressure seems to have worked, since some 11 years later the poorly armed and trained Iraqi army was not able to withstand two offensives, one by the Sunnis and the other by the Kurds.

The Kurdish strategy is well-known, and its success in changing reality on the ground has been predictable as Iraq’s political and security crises have continued to spiral and the Kurds have done nothing to stop the country sliding into the abyss.

As the Baghdad government has remained trapped by the raging Sunni rebellion, the Kurds have continued to gain strength and build their national enterprise in what they may want to call the “State of South Kurdistan.”

Barzani last week called on the Kurdish parliament to make preparations for a referendum in the territories captured by his troops in order to annex them to the Kurdish Region.

He also said a referendum on Kurdish statehood was expected within months. Leaks from media close to Barzani have suggested that the design of a new Kurdistan currency has been finalised and is ready for printing.

The Kurdish leadership’s determination to expedite the declaration of a national state continues to capture newspaper headlines. Ham-fisted analyses have also appeared in the western media in support of the “moral” claims of a Kurdish state.

Yet, even sympathetic allies who believe the Kurds have powerful points to make for self-determination have been reluctant to endorse Kurdish statehood.

The question of how a Kurdish state could undermine stability in the region has vexed successive generations of historians, politicians and diplomats. Such geopolitical objections still exist, and redrawing maps of the region would certainly unleash a geopolitical earthquake that could have far-reaching implications.

The idea of statehood is tempting, especially for nations that have suffered under foreign occupation and domination or do not want to be ruled by others. A Kurdish state separated from northern Iraq is a very different process from decolonisation, however, or even separatist moves in Scotland in the UK or Catalonia in Spain and Flanders in Belgium.

A Kurdish state would be a geopolitical firebomb that would necessarily explode into a raging regional conflagration.

Kurdistan already has many of the trappings of an independent nation, such as its own flag, government, parliament, army, sports teams, and distinctive national identity, following decades of rivalry with the central government in Baghdad. Going the whole way now may not be politically and economically feasible.

With the Kurds spread out over Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, an independent Kurdish state would have two painful paths to pursue: either to trigger pan-Kurdish national ambitions for a Greater Kurdistan, or seek protection from a powerful neighbouring nation to safeguard its territorial integrity.

While the first option would trigger the turbulent fragmentation of three other key Middle East nations, the second would just be a change to the name of foreign subjugation. This would hardly be an “independence” that was truly worth the trouble.

The Sunni mood of rejection, fuelled by policies of exclusion and discrimination exercised by the newly empowered Shia-led government, has become a policy choice that was first displayed in dismay and opposition and later became actions of violent resistance to culminate in a persistent rebellion.

By maximising their goals and resorting to violence, the Sunnis alienated moderate secularist Shias who could have partnered with them in a political alliance to challenge the Shia religious groups that took advantage of Sunni extremism to hold onto power.

Since the seizure of Mosul and several other predominately Sunni cities last month, plunging Iraq into a new cycle of sectarian war, the question that has bewildered analysts has been the nature of the Sunni strategy to further their cause amid Shia mobilisation to stall the Sunni advance and retake the captured towns.

It is well understood that the policies of marginalisation of the Sunni community by Shia Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, which have isolated the Sunnis politically, are a main factor behind the revolt. But doubts remain whether resorting to all-out sectarian war spearheaded by the terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) will allow Iraqi Sunnis to regain their previously dominant role in Iraq’s politics.

Instead, it is feared that the Sunni offensive will only deepen the sectarian schism, further entrench the Shias, and send Iraq down the path of fully-fledged civil war.

The Sunnis face tough questions about their military and political strategy. Baghdad, a city of six million people the majority of them Shias, is unlikely to fall to the Sunni rebels. After absorbing the shock of the defeat, the government forces have also launched a counter-offensive to take back the cities lost to the insurgents.The deployment of newly bought Russian-made Sukhoi (Su-24) bombers and US manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft will drastically shift the military balance in favour of the government troops.

The Iraqi army may not succeed in putting down the Sunni rebellion, but the conflict could trigger a protracted and costly civil war similar to that taking place in neighbouring Syria.The Sunni threats to expand to Baghdad and the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala have already inflamed Shia fears and led to mass mobilisation in Baghdad and Shia cities.Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the Shia religious leader, has urged all Shias “who are capable of carrying arms to join the government” in the fight against the rebels. With sectarian mobilisation on the rise, hostilities are expected to simmer to a boil and spread across Iraq.

A key mistake committed by the Sunnis is their alliance with ISIS in their drive to fight the Shia-led government. Although the partnership with the murderous organisation, responsible for killing thousands of civilians, mostly Shias, dates back to the beginning of the Sunni insurgency, the new alliance will put the Sunnis at the mercy of the terrorist group.The declaration of an Islamic caliphate in Iraq by ISIS this week with temporal and spiritual sovereignty will further complicate the sectarian conflict.

One problem is that the Sunnis will be held responsible for the gruesome atrocities which the group is perpetrating in territories under its control, including the summary executions and extra-judicial killings of Shia civilians, police and soldiers, which will deepen sectarian animosity and create a backlash against the Sunnis across Iraq.

Since ISIS spearheaded, the offensive dark sectarianism has swept many parts of Iraq, and there are already reports of Shia reprisals against Sunnis in Baghdad and elsewhere. In recent days there have been reports of Iraqi police killing Sunni insurgent prisoners in their custody and the sectarian killing of Sunnis in Baghdad.

A second problem is that the Iraqi Sunnis have different goals from those of ISIS, which now wants all Sunnis to pledge allegiance to its “caliph” Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Few among Iraq’s Sunnis are expected to make such a vow, and many have fought ISIS before and are unlikely to endorse either the group’s fanatical strategy or its hard-line tactics.

While some Sunnis will continue to aspire to take back control of the government in Baghdad, most only want an end to their alienation and mistreatment by having an equal share in the power and resources either of a federal or of a unitary Iraq.

Sooner or later, the onslaught on the cities and threats to seize more will prove to be an expensive war of choice boding ill for Iraq’s Sunnis. By taking their anti- government protest movement to a full-scale war, Iraq’s Sunnis are risking not only peace and stability but also the country’s unity.

The Iraqi Kurds have already exploited the turmoil and seized land populated by Sunni Arabs, planning to annex it to the autonomous Kurdistan Region. There is a real danger that the insurgents will end up positioning the Sunnis in a resource-poor canton in the so-called Sunni Triangle in western Iraq and resulting in the de facto partitioning of Iraq.

Seen from this perspective, Iraq’s worsening sectarian conflict and the involvement of the ISIS jihadists will have far-reaching implications not only for its people and its neighbours but also for the Islamic world at large.It may ignite the long-anticipated war within Islam, pitting Shias against Sunnis, on the one hand, and moderate Muslims against radicals, on the other.

The Shia-Sunni split dates back to the 7th century when Prophet Mohamed died and a debate emerged about who should succeed him as leader of the emerging Muslim community.The Shias felt Mohamed’s successor should be his cousin and son-in-law Ali Ben Abi Talib, while the Sunnis chose one of his faithful disciples and argued that a prominent Muslim leader who would follow the Prophet’s traditions should be chosen by consensus.That political debate and struggle for power has led to a sectarian rift which since then Muslims have never been able to heal.

In Iraq, the Sunnis held power since the British occupation following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. Historians point to the role played by the British authorities in empowering the Sunni elite as a new political class at the expense of the majority Shia population.

 By helping the minority Sunnis to dominate the Shias and ethnic Kurds, the British helped set the conditions for today’s sectarianism. While the Sunnis continued to pride themselves on being the guardians of Iraq’s unity, Shia disenchantment with Sunni domination and Kurdish secessionism grew.

Many would now argue that the United States aggravated the situation when it invaded Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime, helping empower the majority Shias through the sectarian-based political process it launched. The same US-engineered system allowed the Kurds to have a federal region, which they gradually and relentlessly turned into a semi-independent entity.

Shia political forces worked through their monopoly of power and control of the security forces to consolidate power and did little to initiate a process of reconciliation and inclusion. As a result, the Sunnis felt that they were without effective political representation and subsequently the biggest losers in post-Saddam Iraq.

Yet, Iraq’s problems are not simply the results of the failure and follies of US policy and the rise of the Shias and the Kurds’ secessionist ambitions. They are also the inevitable consequences of the Sunnis’ maximalist strategy, militancy and lack of a sense of direction and leadership. The Sunnis have always needed a political compass and roadmap that would define peaceful and democratic alternatives and allow them to voice their grievances and push for full partnership in a multi-sect political process.

There are many secularist and nationalist Shias who are opposed to the exclusion of the Sunnis from government and reject Al-Maliki’s sectarianism, authoritarianism and heavy-handed style of government. The Sunnis have common ground with these Shias, who want to build a shared future with their Sunni counterparts. Unfortunately, the Sunnis have failed to reach out to these moderate Shias and make statements about their readiness to work jointly to achieve national goals.

The Sunnis need to work for justice in a participatory political system that includes all sects and ethnicities, but in order to do so they have to come to terms with the Shias and the Kurds. As Brahimi rightly noticed, they need to acknowledge reality and stop defining themselves as the only true Iraqis, dismissing the Shias as traitors and “Iranian stooges.”

The ultimate solution to Iraq’s problems is a political one, and the Sunnis cannot pursue their goals through violence and territorial gains. The Sunnis refused the idea of power-sharing among Iraq’s ethnicities following Saddam’s downfall, claiming that the new political system would herald the break-up of the country.Now by seizing cities, they have drawn the lines of a little “Sunnistan.” Worse still, they have put it under the rule of a terrorist group that has declared it to be a Taliban-style mediaeval caliphate.