Iraq is rapidly sliding into an all-out civil war that is likely to spill over into neighbouring countries, resulting in mass deaths and refugee flows, serious disruption of Gulf oil supplies and a drastic decline in US influence in the region reports Guy Dinmore in Washington for the Financial Times.

This grim forecast is set out in Things Fall Apart, a 130-page report released on Monday by the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy that also recommends how the US might contain the disastrous consequences of “spillover”.

Read it here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/7e9ed5e6-af03-11db-a446-0000779e2340.html