As a likely battle between Sunni militants and Iraqi forces in the streets of Baghdad approaches, mistrust and anger between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq is growing by the day. One man at a Shiite mosque said that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki should carpet bomb ISIS militants and declare Iraq a Shiite-dominated state once and for all, according to NBC news. In many ways Iraq and Syria are a much more romantic place for Islamic militants than Afghanistan ever was — not only are they historically important to Islam, they are much more connected, culturally and geographically, to the rest of the Middle East.