Iraqis under ISIS control say their lives have gotten better

Vox reports Iraqis under ISIS control say their lives have gotten better.

"One of the drivers of the conflict is that Iraq's government, which is dominated by the country's Shia Muslim majority, has badly mistreated the Sunni Muslim minority based in the north. ISIS, who are Sunni extremists, have risen in part by exploiting Sunni resentments against the government, and by linking up with local and national Sunni armed groups. So by actually improving life for the mostly-Sunni population of Mosul, ISIS is making people there more likely to support ISIS's takeover, more likely to resist any efforts by the Iraqi army to retake the city, and less likely to help the army uproot ISIS."

"The trick that ISIS has pulled off here is seizing Mosul but not ruling it directly. The group appears to have handed authority for the large city over to local, tribal, Sunni armed groups. Those groups share ISIS's hatred of the Iraqi national government, so they're happy to help oust the Iraqi army, but unlike ISIS they are not as fixated on imposing extremist Islamism. 'There is no ISIS in Mosul,' a 58-year-old Mosul resident told the Financial Times. 'The ones controlling city are now the clans. The power is with the tribes.'"

Vox also describes, The real roots of Iraq's Sunni-Shia conflict.

"When 2003 came along, a lot of Shias and certainly a lot of Kurds welcomed it. They saw it as their deliverance as Shias and Kurds as much as it was the deliverance of Iraq. On the Sunni side, there was no such sentiment because there barely existed a sense of Sunni identity before 2003. It simply didn't exist in Iraq. Now, what you see is the reverse. The Iraqi government is not popular with anyone, the popularity of the government is rock bottom, I'd say, but Shias are more likely to accord the state, the post-2003 order some level of legitimacy. Whereas there is a body of opinion of among Sunnis who just do not ascribe any legitimacy to it whatsoever."

"Again, the parallel with race relations is very obvious. Sunnis weren't concerned with or particularly knowledgeable about sectarian dynamics because it wasn't an issue for them. They did not perceive themselves to be on the losing end of sectarian dynamics, they weren't even aware of sectarian dynamics! So this is a game that they only started playing in 2003. The other thing is that, in 2003, they had to form a Sunni identity whether they liked it or not because the system mandated it. The system required and made communal identity the central political marker. So they had to find that presentation along identity lines."