The process will begin once the Iraqi establishment completes the tortuous process of appointing a prime minister. Assuming they do not settle on the incumbent, Nuri al-Maliki, the new premier’s first task will be to negotiate a political settlement with the Sunni Arabs, likely to result in a kind of devolved status for the territory the insurgents have captured in recent weeks.
Nor, Shahbander argues, will the other Sunni militias and groups tolerate the ISIS’s imposition of its narrow, hard-line ideology in the longer term.
Chairing the discussion, Nadim Shehadi, associate fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House), agreed that the complex nature of the conflict made mapping alliances very difficult.
“If you go to some policy circles in Europe and in the United States, there is confusion,” he said. “You have people saying that to solve this issue we have to collaborate with Assad and Iran, our allies in the fight against ISIS, and you have people saying that ISIS is the creation of Saudi Arabia.
“And on the other side, you have people saying no, this is the classic game of Iran and the Syrian regime playing arsonist and offering to be the firefighter.”
Z.E. agreed with Shahbander’s view that in Syria, ISIS is allied with President Bashar al-Assad’s government and not, as it might appear, his most dangerous foe.
“The ISIS base in Raqqa was not bombed once,” she recalled, adding that activists used to head there when firing began. “It was the only place where the regime wouldn’t shell us.”
In a vivid description of the war-torn city, she said she was living in the only remaining civilian neighbourhood in Aleppo. People had become so used to the “barrel bombs” dropped by the regime that they now simply tried to go into an inner room to avoid shrapnel if they heard helicopters flying above.
But the crude weapons still exact an awful toll. Z.E. said that last month, one scored a direct hit on a building whose basement had been turned into a school, killing 25 people.
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