Islamic State isn’t looming over Baghdad so much as sulking outside it, in the final Sunni enclave — stalled out and dreaming of a return to the hegemony the Sunni held over the city ten years ago. And if you really think that Baghdad, which is now firmly in Shia hands, is like some damsel in distress, just waiting to be ravished by big, bad IS…well, you haven’t been following the record of the Shia militias which drove the Sunni out in the first place. Those Shia Iraqis may not be much when fighting in the open desert of Anbar Province—they certainly bugged out in a hurry last June, leaving all their expensive American equipment for IS to loot—but they are Hell in urban combat, as the US Army learned the hard way when it took on Moqtada’s Mahdi Army in Sadr City, the huge Shia slum in NE Baghdad.