The day after

A PROMINENT Sunni preacher is describing how the demise of Islamic State could herald a new era of Sunni-Shia reconciliation, when a Shia soldier at the checkpoint outside his home town of Samara interrupts his musings. “Your people blew up our shrines,” he says, ordering the sheikh, Salah al-Taha, out of the car. Left to wait in the sun for a couple of hours while a commanding officer is roused from his rest, the sheikh’s resentment returns. Samarra, 125km (80 miles) north of Baghdad, is no longer his own, he says. Shia militias have taken over the old city, and chased out its Sunni inhabitants.