Government claims fail to ease fear

Iraqi Shiite tribal fighters ready to defend Baghdad against the jihadi army of Sunni rebels who have swept through four Iraqi cities to the north. Photo / AP

The Sunni revolt led by Isis shock troops is getting ever closer to Baghdad, amid fears the capital itself might soon be engulfed by the violence. It has a substantial Shia majority but is surrounded by a ring of Sunni towns and villages.

The battle lines appear less fluid north of Baghdad than they did a few days ago, but Isis has captured the Turkoman-Shia town of Tal Afar with a population of 200,000, west of Mosul. The Government said that it had sent elite forces to win it back, but its loss on Monday is ominous because the Government can no longer plead surprise or treachery as a cause for its defeat. Its 350,000-strong army has yet to win a clear victory since Mosul fell, and this is demoralising Shias who make up 60 per cent of Iraqis.

The Government plays down its defeats, and the first time an Iraqi television viewer or newspaper reader may know that more territory has been lost to Isis is when there is news of a heroic counter-attack inflicting heavy losses on the enemy. Of Tal Afar, one newspaper in Baghdad had a headline saying the women of the city had joined the battle against Isis.

An inhabitant of Tal Afar reached by phone said they had been bombarded for 24 hours by artillery seized by insurgents from the Government, and there were not enough soldiers to hold all four entrances to the town against 3000 Isis fighters while Peshmerga, Kurdish soldiers near the town, had disappeared. The witness fled with his family to Sinjar, a Kurdish area further west.

If the Iraqi Army could win a few of these small battles, it would do much to quell fears that the military is dysfunctional despite vast expenditure for almost a decade.

Instead, Iraqis watch uncheckable claims of success on government television channels and in the pro-government newspapers. "Watch enough government television and pretty soon you would decide there is not a single member of Isis in the country," said one observer. Spurious accounts of Iraqi Army success serve only to depress the popular mood. Film on television of government airstrikes skate over the fact that the Government has very few fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters. One soldier fighting in Anbar province said: "The troops are not even getting enough food to eat."

A better pointer to official expectations is the number of senior officials who have left the country. Al-Mashriq says that 42 MPs and seven ministers have moved to Amman, the Jordanian capital, with their families.

Dhia'a al-Assadi, an MP who has stayed , said: "We expect terrible days to come. They will be decisive in deciding if the country will remain united." He did not foresee the fall of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki because most Shia would rally behind him in the present crisis which they see as an attempt to rob them of the power that is their right as the majority of Iraqis were long subjected to Sunni domination. He did not think that Iran would allow Baghdad to fall into the hands of an anti-Shia counter-revolution.

A problem is lack of time: Shia have volunteered to fight Isis in large numbers but, as one observer put it, many of them "have only fired a pistol in the air at weddings and will need to be trained".