Serious threat

DW: Over the past few days the ISIS Islamist group has managed to take large areas of Iraq, including the provincial capital Mosul. Even if we are now hearing reports that the Iraqi army has succeeded in recapturing the city of Tikrit, can the Iraqi army push back ISIS without outside help?

Michael Lüders: No, the Iraqi army can't do that. It may have large numbers, with more than 1 million soldiers, but it is undisciplined and unmotivated, above all because the Iraqi army is set up using religious and ethnic quotas, and Sunni soldiers see no reason to shoot Sunni insurgents.

Is it still possible to prevent a break-up of Iraq, or is it already too late for that?

Iraq is already a divided, failed state and this ISIS offensive essentially constitutes the death knell for what still exists, on paper at least, as a central state. The Maliki government is completely unable to cope. It is helpless. The Americans, and the Turks in particular, will observe developments over the next few days and weeks. It cannot be ruled out that Turkey will send soldiers into the Kurdish region to protect these against possible attack by ISIS. That would be a very paradoxical situation, if Turkish troops, of all people, who usually fight Kurds in the southwest of Turkey, were now to provide military support for the Kurds in northern Iraq.

The United States has also announced that it wants to help defend the Kurdish regions. It remains to be seen what exactly will happen. But this conflict cannot be resolved by military means. The whole region is being sucked in by ISIS, which is the first Islamic fundamentalist movement to have succeeded in establishing itself across several borders. Above all in Iraq, but also in Syria, where it is one of Bashar al-Assad's most serious and dangerous opponents. And it is also increasingly gaining influence in Lebanon.

Speaking of the United States, was all the political and military influence the US brought to bear in recent years, perhaps even decades, in vain?

First of all, I have to say that the Americans bear a large share of the responsibility for this disaster. What is happening now is the price for the mistakes the Americans made after the fall of Saddam Hussein. If there was something that could have been done wrong, then they did it wrong. Starting with the dissolution of large sections of the Iraqi army, the dissolution of the Baath Party, the party of Saddam Hussein. This meant that, overnight, hundreds of thousands of Sunnis were without a job, and they then formed the core of the resistance to the American occupation. And various terrorist groups evolved from this resistance, including the ISIS.

The responsibility does not lie with the Americans alone, though, but also with the Maliki government. Maliki is a corrupt politician who has absolutely failed to understand the tasks that lie ahead for Iraq; that he actually has the task of uniting the different religious and ethnic groups. Instead, he has encouraged division between them. Now he's paying the price for that, and it will probably be very difficult for him to survive politically.

Is there a danger that, after al-Qaida, ISIS will now bring terrorism to the United States?

Things haven't yet got that far. ISIS is a movement that will first attempt to consolidate its position of power in Iraq and Syria. If ISIS were to carry out terrorist attacks - because ISIS regards the West, and of course Israel, as its enemy - then the first targets of such terrorist attacks would certainly be Europeans. I can't see ISIS being logistically in a position to carry out attacks in the US - but they definitely could in Europe. The biggest worry of the security services in Europe is that fighters with European passports will get training in Syria and then will come back here and spread violence and terror.

Is ISIS the biggest danger for Europe, in terms of security policy - or could it become so?

Absolutely. The situation that's brewing on the Turkish border constitutes a very, very serious challenge for the European security services. Turkey also has every reason to be worried. For its part, it is paying a high price for a very short-sighted policy. In Syria it supported ISIS against Bashar al-Assad in order to try to topple the regime. Now, in Iraq, ISIS is Turkey's enemy, although these are essentially the same people.

This terrorism is, of course, sponsored by Saudi Arabia, by the Gulf states, which support ISIS with weapons and money in the hope that these radical fighters will take on the Shiites and fight them. Saudi Arabia sees itself as the protector of the Sunnis and Iran, a Shiite country, as its arch-enemy. That is very, very short-sighted. The Saudis must also assume that they themselves will eventually become the targets of ISIS violence, as they did for al Qaeda.

What, in your opinion, should the West do for its own security? Military involvement?

No, absolutely not. Military measures will achieve nothing at all. That might relieve things in the short term, but it will not resolve the fundamental problem. Countries have to appeal to the powers in the region, such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, to stop supporting ISIS. Of course, a breakthrough in nuclear talks with Iran is also necessary. Iran and the West, the Europeans, have the same enemy: ISIS. It would be a tragedy if the nuclear talks were to break down. Then Iran would see no reason to fight ISIS and would leave the task to us.

In any case, the problems of ISIS and the instability of Iraq will last for months and years. At the end of it all, ISIS will be beaten. The potential is there, but it is going to take a very, very long time and there will be a price to pay.

Michael Lüders is a journalist and political and economic consultant as well as an author of fiction and non-fiction. A political scientist, he is also deputy head of the German Orient-Foundation.