Mr. Visser, who edits a Web site for posting historical research on Iraq, www.historiae.org, said that despite arguments by those in favor of partition, "Iraq has no tradition of being compartmentalized into neat, sectarian entities," except for a relatively brief period between 1880 and World War I. "For long periods before the 1880s, the Ottoman Empire governed these lands as one," he said.
Ironically, disparate forces of change like IS, the Houthis, and the Kurds, and counterrevolutionary forces headed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, agree tacitly on one thing: pursuing their divergent goals involves a violent and bloody process that will carve up various states into ethnic and sectarian entities.
Public universities are all non-sectarian entities, and are further classified as State University and College (SUC) or Local College and University (LCU).
Every entity is run by its own director and becoming more sectarian.
It says they portray a group with an organised military structure with a clear political strategy to set up a Sunni sectarian state – and one with several of the hallmarks of a corporate entity.
For critics, the support of those Shiite entities has bolstered a view that the militias are sectarian, pitting members of the president's Alawite sect — an offshoot of Shiism — as well as members of Syria's much smaller Shiite minority against the mostly Sunni uprising.
The Arab world is consumed by sectarian conflict, with Iran and Saudi Arabia fighting each other across multiple battlefields through proxy entities.
Officials accuse him of creating a sectarian atmosphere and of forming groups that "follow foreign religious ideologies and political entities".
As a result, national boundaries seem increasingly fragile as groups like the Kurds in Syria and Iraq carve out entities of their own and religious groups in Iraq find themselves caught between a sectarian government they do not trust and a jihadist force they fundamentally dislike.
It is little coincidence that IS flourishes in two sectarian states where Sunnis have been marginalized, or that in declaring a new cross border state, the IS has recreated an entity with a Sunni majority -- which indeed used to dominate Iraq.
