Obama said he authorised the use of force to protect Americans, safeguard Christians and members of other minorities who have fled for their lives, and press Baghdad to form an inclusive government to end the political crisis. But his message was loud and clear: the US would protect the independence-seeking Kurdistan Region.

As questions are being raised about Obama’s airstrikes strategy in Iraq, the Kurds, who are in a tug-of-war with Baghdad, seem to be the only beneficiaries of the US military’s return to Iraq two years after the troop withdrawal and Obama’s pledge to avoid direct military involvement in the beleaguered nation.

A little background may be necessary to put into perspective the conclusion that the US military intervention has come primarily to support its Kurdish allies or, as was bluntly put by Obama himself, to “stop the advance on [the Kurdish capital] Erbil.”

When the jihadists of the Islamic State captured Mosul in June and made headway into other Sunni-dominated cities in western Iraq, Kurdish leaders, at loggerheads with the Shia-led government, were quick to blame the Iraqi security forces for the advance which had rattled the violence-ripped country and threatened to tear it further apart.

To further discredit the Iraqi security forces that had failed to withstand the IS offensive, Jabar Yawar, secretary-general of the Kurdish Peshmarga forces and a key Kurdish spokesman, claimed that some of the 200,000 retreating Iraqi forces had joined the jihadist rebels.

Though the collapse of the Iraqi army in Mosul stunned the world, the reason Kurdish leaders trumpeted its defeat was to portray the Baghdad Shia-led government as being incapable of protecting Iraq in the face of creeping danger, a pretext they later used to justify their seizure of large swathes of land in three provinces, including the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani also moved swiftly to ask the Kurdish parliament to establish an electoral commission and set a date for a referendum on independence, vowing that the newly acquired territories would be defended by Kurdish Peshmerga forces.

Such was the feeling of triumphalism that Kurdish leaders boasted that the Peshmerga, meaning those facing death in Kurdish, were a formidable force that would rather die in defence of the newly acquired territories than surrender.

What may seem to be Kurdish bombast and political opportunism drew criticism from Shia politicians who charged the Kurdish leadership with complicity in the IS capture of Mosul and with exploiting the Iraqi army’s defeat to grab territories and break away from Iraq.

In a fiery statement, outgoing prime minister Nuri Al-Maliki accused the Kurdish Regional Government of failing to “provide an example of patriotic partnership” by hosting leaders of the Sunni insurgency and IS terrorists in Erbil, the Kurdish capital.

In protest, the Kurdish leadership ended all participation in Iraq’s national government, and the outgoing Kurdish Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari put the blame squarely on Al-Maliki, saying the prime minister and his security officials were to blame for the rise of the Sunni Muslim insurgents.

In their turn, many Iraqi Shia politicians capitalised on the Peshmerga’s retreat to ridicule the fighters, who pride themselves on being a well-armed, trained and battle-tested force, for failing to fight the less-experienced IS fighters. They accused them of abandoning hundreds of thousands of Christians, Yazidis and Turkmens to the terrorist group.

What seemed to be blame-trading and mud-slinging has now turned into grand political farce. Both the Baghdad government and the Kurdish leaders have failed to deal with the IS danger, paving the way for the group’s rise and now to a new American military adventure in Iraq that may escalate the sectarian and ethnic strife that afflicts the country.

With IS increasing its gains and keeping its murderous machine in motion, the noisy debate between Baghdad and Kurdistan may have abated. Simplistic analysis has tried to use the Arabic proverb “My enemy’s enemy is my friend” to explain the present convergence as a matter of necessity and one that could lead to a breakthrough in Iraq’s lingering governmental crisis, also a prerequisite set by Obama for further military assistance to Iraq.

But the core of Iraq’s problems today is the crisis triggered by IS control over vast Sunni territories and the Kurds’ declaration that they intend to go for independence after capturing large swathes of land.

Not everyone is convinced that Obama’s two-pronged strategy of pursuing airstrikes on IS and pushing for the formation of an inclusive government in Baghdad will restore stability and stop Iraq’s dramatic descent into the abyss.

Most analysts agree that the US bombings of IS positions are ineffective and cannot hold off the extremists who are now slaughtering people or forcing them into submission. They wonder how limited airstrikes on IS artillery, or the few hundred advisers earlier dispatched to Iraq, can fix something that couldn’t be fixed with the hundreds of thousands of US troops that were in the area for over a decade.

The other stated goal of the operation, to help protect minorities, can also hardly be expected to save these hundreds of thousands of people and help them return to their towns and villages that are now under IS control.

The point to remember here is that the United States and the West waited for a long time to move to protect the Yazidis and Christians weeks after IS started its carnage of the minorities in Nineveh, while the Kurdish Peshmerga stood idle or abandoned their posts and fled. In fact, the Christians, Yazidis and Shabaks have now become hostages to the Kurds, who claim that their towns and villages belong to Kurdistan and have long been exercising a policy of Kurdisation to change their religious and ethnic identities.

The goal of protecting US diplomats and other personnel in Iraq through airstrikes on IS positions is not even worthy of discussion. If Washington was simply concerned about its staff’s well-being, it could evacuate them. But they are there largely to implement US policies in Iraq and are needed there despite the risk.

As for Obama’s instance on ending Iraq’s governmental crisis in order to provide sustainable military assistance, the prospect seems unpromising even after Iraqi President Fouad Masuom nominated Haider Al-Abadi as the new prime minister.

With Al-Maliki refusing to step down, the country’s power struggle could be further intensified, worsening the IS threat and the country’s sectarian conflict.

With two-thirds of Iraq now out of Baghdad’s control, the time has passed for any new government, which will be formed by the same corrupt politicians, to stem the IS advances, let alone to stop Iraq plunging into further political chaos.

It should be asked of Obama’s pledge of military action in Iraq whether it can prevent the country from falling apart or whether it is simply the last act in a process of disintegration triggered by the US-led invasion in 2003.

By all accounts, what the Obama administration has done so far, in the words of Rudaw, a Kurdish news outlet close to Barzani, is to boost world support and recognition of the Kurdish Region.

“The liberation of the Kurdistan Region was also achieved by the international reaction to the crimes of Saddam Hussein against the Kurds in 1991,” wrote Ako Mohamed, the director of Rudaw Tuesday.

Two developments are also worth watching here. First, the American airstrikes have helped the Kurdish forces reclaim a few towns from the Islamic State, and second the United States has also started arming the Peshmerga.

While it is not clear if all the Christians, Yazidis and Shabak will consider returning to their homes under the looming danger, the US military involvement will clear the way for the Kurds to consolidate their control of these territories. The greater weapon supplies will, meanwhile, facilitate the long-feared fragmentation of Iraq.

For many years the Kurds have lamented the fact they had “no friends but the mountains” as they fought successive Iraqi governments for autonomy. Now, with the Americans at hand and at a decisive moment in their long-awaited independence, they have a mighty friend with global reach at their side.

But the question remains of how long this will prove to be the case.

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.