WITH all eyes on Syria's civil war, the deepening crisis in neighbouring Iraq has all but fallen off the news radar.

Yesterday however, a series of bomb blasts in Baghdad and Mosul that left at least 11 people dead and wounded dozens more was just the latest bloody reminder that Iraq itself is facing a renewal of sectarian violence on a scale not seen since the end of its own civil war in 2008.

Indeed, so bad is the situation there now that many observers view it as the most critical moment facing the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 or the final withdrawal of US troops at the end of 2011.

At risk of over-egging how dangerous all this is, there appears to be a growing school of thought that Iraq is teetering on the edge of a sectarian conflict that would match that of Syria and most likely cause the country to implode.

Working on the assumption that things are this bad, it leads us to a couple of crucial questions. The first of these concerns timing and the issue of why this is taking place right now?

The second question worth addressing – albeit inextricably connected to the first – relates to just what the key contributing factors are that have left Iraq on the edge of the abyss?

In the first instance the answer to the initial question lies within Iraq itself.

While the government in Baghdad is correct when it says that the country is a victim of spillover from the Syrian uprising, this it not the whole story and serves only to deflect from its own failings.

As Michael Knights, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former adviser to the Iraqi government and security forces, pointed out recently, negative indicators abound in Iraq.

Among these have been the reactivation of armed civilian militias, tit-for-tat bombings targeting Sunni and Shi'ite mosques, and the breakdown of some Iraqi military forces into ethnic-sectarian components or suffering from chronic absenteeism.

There is simply no getting away from the fact that security improvements inside Iraq had already ground to a halt long before the Syrian crisis began in spring 2011.

Along with many other analysts Mr Knights points also to the mounting frustration across many segments of Iraq's body politic, be they Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shia fed up with the government's inability to address political or economic inequities, leading them all to talk more vigorously about partition.

Having said all this, and without letting the Iraq government off the hook, Baghdad has a case when it says the impact of the war in neighbouring Syria has rapidly exacerbated Iraq's internal tensions, which takes us back to the pressing question of timing.

At one level Iraq's newly empowered Shia majority is contributing to the ferocity of the fighting in Syria by its absolute unwillingness to make meaningful compromises with Iraq's Sunni minority that fell from power.

The fate of Iraq's Sunnis after the fall of Saddam Hussein is an almost identical story of what is happening to Syria's ruling Alawi sect, albeit in reverse. The prevailing narrative in both countries involves domination of a majority by a cohesive minority.

Out of this, Iraq's Sunnis have come to the conclusion that they now constitute a permanently disenfranchised underclass and in desperation they increasingly turn to violence.

This anger and combustibility suits al Qaeda in Iraq to a tee. Exploiting it to the hilt gives them the chance to reignite sectarian warfare in Iraq, potentially giving the jihadists an uninterrupted operating space stretching from Iraq to Lebanon.

To that end, they have focused on appropriating the Syrian jihadist movement Jabhat al Nusrah through an alliance of sorts, renaming the joint group al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria.

Al Qaeda in Iraq has also redoubled its efforts to commandeer some of the cash and weapons flowing to the Syrian rebels from international backers – particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar – that consider a Iranian-allied regime in Syria a strategic threat.

Both Saudi Arabia and al Qaeda in Iraq are trying to capitalise on the growing anti-Shia and anti-Iran sentiments in the region caused by Sunni deaths in Syria.

While the Saudis' priority may be to use the jihadists to weaken Iran, the jihadists have their own long-term agenda hoping to emerge as a major political force in Syria and Iraq as a result of this anti-Iran drive.

Since mid-May alone, more than 300 people have been killed and hundreds more wounded in bombings by suspected jihadists across Iraq that have largely targeted the country's Shi'ite population.

It's probably fair to say the Islamists sense their moment has come and have been presented with a pivotal opportunity to annex the most significant area of operation since the movement was based in Afghanistan before the 2001 US invasion.

As one analyst from the US-based independent intelligence monitoring group Stratfor recently summed it up, the jihadists' aim is "to turn both Syria and Iraq into a single battlespace".

As the regional stakes increase so too does the jihadists' audacity. Yesterday, Iraqi authorities said they had foiled a plot by al Qaeda in Iraq to use tanker trucks packed with explosives to attack a key Baghdad oil facility.

Right now, though, this will be the least of the Iraqi government's worries as they seek – but so far fail miserably – to staunch the sectarian-inspired violence so crucial to the jihadists' strategy.

Over the last few days Martin Kobler, the UN special representative to Iraq, made clear the dangers of the current slide within the country towards all out sectarian civil war.

"Systemic violence is ready to explode at any moment if all Iraqi leaders do not engage immediately to pull the country out of this mayhem," he said in Baghdad.

For the time being, few among Iraq's leaders appear to be listening and the jihadists continue to stoke the embers of sectarianism across both Iraq and Syria.

Only time will tell whether common sense or insanity prevails.