One does not need to peer through a crystal ball or perhaps read the patterns formed in Turkish coffee grounds to see what the future holds for Iraq. Iraq's contemporary history since the early 20th century has been perhaps best illustrated by how power tends to transition from one group to another. From the birth of modern Iraq until today, the country has seen no less than 12 major revolts – always bloody – and the army conducted four coups – usually bloody – showing that wielding power in the country is rarely a peaceful endeavor. The most recent government to be overthrown through violence was that of Saddam Hussein, who was ousted by the United States and their allies, and the man himself was executed by the new American and Iranian sponsored Shiite government.But where will all this lead? The devil, so they say, is in the details. Almost every time a "new order" has been imposed on Iraq, members of the old order were purged and usually killed. This happened when the British crushed Rasheed Aali Gaylani's attempt to rid Iraq of their influence in the 1940s. He was forced to flee and his co-conspirators were crushed by the British military. It also happened when the Baathist July 14 revolution took place in 1958, overthrowing the monarchy and killing most of the royal family. Most recently, the new kings of the Green Zone, under American tutelage, began a process of de-Baathification in 2003, attempting to purge every last vestige of Saddam's influence from any future Iraqi state.This process was given a deliberately vague title in order to marry up with the stated, though clearly not intended, the U.S. objective of removing Saddam and his Baath Party completely from Iraq in order to facilitate a new democratic process. This sounded good in theory, but in practice it was a total disaster for Iraq, although it served as a boon to its enemies. There are many kinds of Baathists, and this vague policy was designed to empower the new governors of Iraq to remove anyone they did not like from their jobs and from any possible position of influence. Many Iraqis were members of the Baath Party because that was the mechanism through which one was promoted through the civil service, military, police and many other organizations under Baathist rule. Thus, the process turned into a veritable witch hunt.As the newly endowed power holders, Iranian-aligned Shiite parties, such as the eponymous Islamic Dawa Party (Islamic Call Party), proceeded to target any Sunnis, and even Shiites, who would not play ball with the new order. Tens of thousands were expelled from their jobs and a functioning Iraqi civil service simply crumbled. The same happened to the military, police and security services, freeing up jobs for extremist militias to start wearing state-issued uniforms and the beginning of a great shift from institutions that served the nation to ones that served the interests of groups such as the sectarian Badr Brigades. The army itself was completely disbanded by then U.S. Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq Paul Bremer with the agreement of almost all of the Kurd- and Shiite-dominated Iraqi Governing Council, leaving hundreds of thousands of soldiers unemployed. The entire army was replaced by a new, inexperienced force of corrupt officers with political ambitions and agendas. This led to the now exposed Iraqi "ghost soldiers" scandal, where tens of thousands of absentee soldiers were having their paychecks cashed by corrupt officers, and this during a war with an existential threat such as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Those who escaped the de-Baathification were pro-Iranian Shiites, such as the current commander of the Samarra Special Forces Command, Sabah al-Fatlawi, and his sister who is a member of parliament, Hanan al-Fatlawi, a close aide to former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who were confirmed as members by Baathists themselves.But what of Iraq's future? It is highly unlikely that ISIS will be able to maintain its hold of the ground it has taken in Iraq. Shiites hate them, Kurds hate them, Sunni Arabs hate them and Turkmens hate them. Simply put, it is impossible to rule a land where everybody hates you – just ask President Bashar Assad in Syria. At some point, perhaps a year or so from now, ISIS will have to return to hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, as opposed to the battles it now conducts with the aim of capturing cities and resources. That is not to say that ISIS will not remain a threat, because it most assuredly will as long as Iraq is this corrupt, divided and the playground of international and regional powers. However, the ISIS threat will recede from its current prominence and we will return to business as usual in Iraq – arbitrary arrests, summary executions and people being killed based on identity.Post-2003, Iraq's "normal" is of course nothing of the sort, and something has to give way eventually. This kind of rampant sectarianism cannot last, the ineptitude of the government and Iraqi politicians will eventually topple to other forces – at this stage, it is impossible to say who – and the influence of Iran will one day diminish, perhaps when Iraqi Shiites decide they do not want to play second fiddle to Persian ayatollahs. It is not unprecedented as Iraqi Shiites fighting Iranians is nothing new – many of them fought in the Iran-Iraq War. On that day, all eyes will turn to those who will be perceived as having run the country into the ground, as having tortured and killed countless Iraqis and collaborated and worked with foreign powers in the most treasonous of ways. In other words, all eyes will turn to the Islamic Dawa Party.The Islamic Dawa Party, while not alone in its sectarianism, has the lion's share of the blame for the catastrophe that is Iraq. The Iraqi intelligentsia has all but vanished, creating a brain drain where before, Iraq was the leading Arab country in terms of educated academics. The Iraqi economy is in tatters even after the end of Western sanctions. Security is non-existent and basic services such as sanitation, drainage and clean water are considered luxuries rather than par for the course. Of course, mismanagement and bad governance are not the most shocking of all the crimes attributed to them. The Islamic Dawa Party has presided over state-sponsored terrorism by supporting militias who slaughter Sunnis, murdered Shiites who spoke against the government and is complicit in causing Iraqi women to be victims of sexual violence.After all of the Islamic Dawa Party's heinous crimes against the Iraqi people, we can certainly expect a de-Dawafication process to occur in Iraq in the near future, and perhaps some of their leadership will follow in Saddam Hussein's footsteps in more ways than one.* Doctoral candidate in strategy and security at University of Exeter and alumnus of the Department of War Studies at the King's College of London