baghdad is going to fall. the units are coming out. they re predominantly shia. maliki will turn it over to a competent general and we ll harden the defense of baghdad. once he has a reasonably strong defense of baghdad, at that point you leave the fortress and you take back the terrain that you ve lost, but the i.s.i.s., these guys are coming into territory that is increasingly unfriendly to them so unfriendly to the government? unfriendly to no, they re coming out of the sunni triangle where they have a basis of support. where they ve got people who are either friendly or at least going to turn a blind eye but as they come into the shia controlled areas or where we ve got more shia population, it s going to get tougher for the isis to prosecute. i suspect that we ll see a turn in the combat here to maliki. what do you make of john
we re prepared to help them. your thoughts about the situation right now? get to the general in a second. same question to both of you. what s it look like on the war front right now in the outskirts of baghdad? chris, you have to think that baghdad won t fall although a week ago i would say mow ssul wouldn t fall. the best units of the iraqi military and shia s military will put up a greater fight than i.s.i.s. did. this is a war that the iraqis have to win on the ground. it s already well for us to say to maliki you should govern better, but that s a problem for next week, next month if he can
produced in incredible reaction from the shia population who are the majority in iraq. so now you had a disaffected sunni minority, but also engaged shia majority. and that s what began the iraqi civil war that continued up general david petraeus was able to stabilize the situation militarily, but most importantly, also politically by reaching out to those sunni describes and groups bringing them in, trying to create a government of national unity. and what has happened since then is that prime minister maliki has once again turned on the sunnis. he stopped funding them, persecuted them. so we re back very close to those conditions that sparked the civil war. and if that p harhappen, violen will probably go up five-fold and it will become as deadly a place as syria.
forces into duyala province to push the isis fighters back away from the capital. this also not just to protect the shia shines as you werine, iraqi security forces are not exactly standing up and fighting. another thing to look at is the trajectory that this violence has taken, the way isis chosen to go go through the territory toward the capital baghdad. these are predominantly sunni areas where they do have a certain degree of support from the sunni population and where also even though ic isis is the organization in the spotlight, it is gets support. the battle between sunni and shia is being joined by some well-known insurgent groups prominent during the u.s. occupation of iraq, not necessarily fighting alongside
of baghdad, hoping to protect the capital from an onslaught by sunni terrorists threatening to overthrow the shiite government. can they be stopped? how did this situation deteriorate so quickly. we have a former deputy director of the counter terrorist center, author of the book, take down, inside the hunt for al qaeda. phil, what went wrong and how did this happen so quickly? what went wrong, you have a government that is supposed to represent the iraqi people but the government, led by nouri al-maliki represents the shia population but sunnis in a lot of the anbar province where you see a lot of this government. we re not represented by this government. maliki is taking over. eric: u.s. said they were concerned about this for months. you could see this coming but when you sit in the situation room at the white house and you get out of the beltway and go into that decision-making