What We Left Behind
At the New Yorker, Dexter Filkins analyzes what the United States is leaving in Iraq: an authoritarian leader, weakened infrastructure, and growing sectarian strife. “The capture of Iraqi territory by Islamic extremists, barely two years since the last American soldiers left, prompted an extraordinary wave of soul-searching in Iraq and the United States, which lost more than thirteen hundred men and women in Anbar Province,” writes Filkins. “When the last American soldiers left Iraq, at the end of 2011, the bloody civil war between the country’s Sunni and Shiite sects had been stifled but not resolved. Now the sectarian violence had returned, with terrifying intensity.”