The crisis now engulfing Iraq may trigger a civil war in which countless numbers of Christians are slaughtered, says Kenneth Timmerman, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Maryland.
"This was entirely predictable. We've seen this coming for years,'' Timmerman, an investigative journalist, told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
"My fear really is that the next thing that's going to happen is that you're going to have a huge massacre of Christians in Mosul and the surrounding areas. This could lead to an Iraqi civil war.''
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An al-Qaida splinter group called ISIS wants to create one Islamic state out of Iraq and Syria and has already captured the cities of Mosul and Tikrit. They are now zeroing in on Baghdad.
"They are, I would say, the intelligent, war smart brand of al-Qaida. They are very good at military strategy,'' Timmerman said.
"They've shown it here. They just won a huge major city in Iraq with virtually no bloodshed. They got the army to walk away, to drop their weapons and walk away."
Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki "is in big trouble. He's supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran and by the United States. Gee, that makes strange bedfellows, doesn't it?''
Timmerman said ISIS is so powerful, its militant forces now control contiguous territory from Northern Syria to Iraq.
"So this is a huge crescent of territory that they control. This is trouble for us and for our friends,'' he said.
Timmerman believes the possibility that Iraq will be turned into a caliphate — an Islamic state led by a supreme religious and political leader — is real.
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