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As the prospect of Iraq's breakup looms, regional and world powers are scrambling to respond.

Baghdad has lost control of a large patch of both northern Nineveh Province and western Anbar Province to insurgents that include the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), as well as former Baathists and other Sunni Arab Iraqis who view the central government as their enemy.

President Barack Obama is considering air strikes to support the beleaguered government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and yesterday said all options are on the table. "I don鈥檛 rule out anything, because we do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria, for that matter," he said.

The Iranians, who along with the United States support the Maliki government, have also expressed alarm. Reuters cites an unnamed "senior" Iranian official as saying that the country is even willing to consider coordinating military assistance with the US.聽

"We can work with Americans to end the insurgency in the Middle East," Reuters quoted the official as saying. "We are very influential in Iraq, Syria,聽 and many other countries."

For now, the southward advance of the Sunni Arab insurgents appears to have stalled. Mosul, one of Iraq's largest cities, was overrun earlier this week as demoralized and incompetent Iraqi soldiers abandoned their posts and uniforms in droves, and insurgents easily took Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, well south along the Tigris River.

But Iraq's military has put up more of a fight as the insurgents have drawn closer to major Shiite population centers. Insurgent efforts to take the Shiite shrine city of Samarra, south of Tikrit and about 70 miles north of Baghdad, were rebuffed, Agence France-Presse reports.

While the units in northern Iraq were mixed Sunni and Shiite, contributing to the high rate of desertions there, troops closer to Baghdad and the southern Shiite heartland have a more uniform sectarian makeup and are more supportive of Maliki's government. They also are fighting for something they feel is "theirs."

Lt. Gen. John N. Bednarek, who runs the US office in Baghdad that oversees training and weapons deliveries to the Iraqi military, offered a grim assessment of the Iraqi Army in a closed hearing of the US Senate's Armed Services Committee yesterday, according to The New York Times.

He said "that some of the Iraqi soldiers who guarded the Green Zone in the capital had come to work wearing civilian clothes under their military uniform, according to one senator. The implication was that the troops were prepared to strip to civilian attire and flee if they came under heavy attack."

The paper summarizes its interviews with US intelligence and military officials this way:

That loss of confidence could be seen in Maliki's calls for the arming of civilians this week and today, in a statement from the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered preacher, in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala. Sistani's representative, Abdel Mahdi al-Karbalai, said "citizens" should arm themselves and fight to protect Iraq. After Friday prayers, some Shia mosques in Baghdad were broadcasting a call to arms over their loudspeakers.

Iraq's long-open sectarian wounds, exacerbated by Maliki's policies over the past five years, were what made the fall of Mosul so easy. A Bloomberg interview with a Mosul resident captures a sentiment聽 that many there have been expressing to reporters.

The Washington Post worries that Iraq could be on a path to sectarian reprisal killings on the scale of 2006-07 when tens of thousands were killed, many civilians whose only crime was belonging to the wrong faith.

Though it seems unlikely that insurgents, particularly since they include the jihadis of ISIS, who view Shiites as apostates that deserve death, will be able to advance into the Shiite majority areas of the south, the partition of the Sunni majority areas of Iraq in the west and north, once unthinkable, now seems possible.

Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite politician and former Baathist whose nationalist, rather than sectarian, view of the Iraqi state made him popular with many Sunnis and whose bloc won the most votes in the 2010 parliamentary election, told CNN that the outlook is very grim.