“Just two years after U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq, the U.S. ambassador there says the country may be one suicide attack away from a full-on civil war,” ABC News reports.  

Said Ambassador Robert Stephen Beecroft: “We’re in a very precarious situation where a misstep anywhere could set off larger conflicts within the country, and that’s what we need to stay away from. The wrong person gets killed, the wrong mosque gets attacked and exploded and you run the risk of sectarian conflict.”  

“Beecroft said 2,000 ‘hard core’ extremists are estimated to be provoking sectarian violence within the country… The recent fighting has been particularly severe in Anbar province, where al Qaeda-affiliated fighters and other extremists have taken control of parts of the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. Beecroft estimated that there are several hundred extremist militants currently in Fallujah, but would not estimate the number in Ramadi, because he said ‘they’ve basically been forced out of most parts of Ramadi’ and do not have centralized control.”