Here comes Sunnistan

I am in Baghdad armed with a copy of a travel guide called Iraq then and now.

My 2008 version - penned when Iraq seemed to be finally emerging from its brutal civil war - is already way out of date.

And in coming years the publisher might well have to produce not one guide to Iraq, but two or three - for all the signs are, right now, that the country is about to split for good.

In the north and west, Isil militants and former Ba'athists now hold Mosul and Tikrit, and the thinking is that the government might never get them back.

Not only is the Iraqi army badly run and demoralised, it is up against an insurgency that has already proved to be one of the most lethal in the world, having held its own for nearly a decade against the US military.

Though the odd US air strike might help the Iraqi security forces a bit, the most they might hope for is retaking Tikrit, a relatively small place.

Mosul seems out of the question, as do Fallujah and Ramadi to the west, which Isis seized five months ago.

In effect, a new state is being carved out, broadly along the lines of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartlands, where Sunnis will be free from the writ of the Shia-led government that they say treats them as second-class citizens.

Given that the Sunnis did much the same when they were in power under Saddam, it was always a safe bet that a Shia regime might look on them less than sympathetically.

But even so, I can't imagine Sunnistan, or whatever it will be called, being a happy place.

For a start, the fledgling nation's new masters will most likely be the religious zealots of Isis, rather than the more secular, nationalist Ba'athists with whom they have allied. Debate has been raging as to which of these two factions is piggybacking on which, but informed sources appear to think that it is Isil that has the whip hand.

Which, of course, means turning Sunnistan into a 14th-century caliphate, with no boozing, no dancing, and no fun of any sort. Save, perhaps, for watching the odd crucifixion of a hapless foreigner with his fatally out-of-date tourist guide.

Sunnistan will be a pariah state, fused with Isil turf in Syria to become the living embodiment of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams.

It isn't just Sunni Iraq that is at risk of breaking away, though. Recent events might lead to the Kurdish north, which is semi-independent anyway, severing all of what remains of its fractious ties to the rest of the country.

There is fury in Baghdad at the way Kurdish troops occupied the oil-rich city of Kirkuk after the Iraqi army had melted away. The city is a prize the Kurds are unlikely to hand back.

Many Shia believe the Kurds deliberately plotted with Isil for it to happen this way but the facts, either way, do not matter. In Iraq's paranoid, vicious political sphere, the version of events that people want to believe is the one that often becomes the truth.

All of which will turn what was Iraq into a trio of small, quarrelsome statelets, only one of which, Kurdistan, seems to have much going for it. Sunnistan will be a nightmare, and Baghdad and the south will have to survive with the Middle East's equivalent of Somalia on its doorstep, doing its best all the time to destabilise its neighbour.

Every time I come here, I meet up for a discreet drink with my old translator, a disillusioned Saddam-era tank commander who is partial to a foul cocktail of whisky and Turkish lager (I call it a Chemical Ali).

And every time - through bad times and not-so-bad - he swigs his potent brew and declares sadly: "Iraq is f***ed, my friend."

This time, he might be right.