Iraq's apparently irreconcilable politicians have failed to start a process to elect new leaders, lurching the country ever close to partition and defying desperate calls for unity from regional and global powers.
The much-anticipated session of the country's parliament started on Tuesday with enough members in attendance to ensure the nomination of a speaker would go ahead. However, the meeting quickly descended into farce, with Sunnis and Kurds using an unscheduled recess to withdraw their legislators, ensuring the session collapsed.
Both blocs insisted that Shia politicians name their candidate for prime minister before they revealed their own nominations for speaker. By convention in Iraq, the prime minister's position goes to the Shia, the speaker's position goes to the Sunnis, while the president goes to the Kurds.
The standoff underscored the deep divisions that run through the fragile state's political class, which has been unable to find unity even as a raging insurgency poses an imminent threat to Iraq's stability.
Hours before parliament met, the leader of the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government, Massoud Barazani, said Iraq was already "effectively partitioned".
Barazani told the BBC he would hold a referendum on independence for the Kurds within months, a move that, if carried out, would spell the end of the modern state of Iraq and likely inflame the surrounding region.
"Everything that's happened recently shows that it's the right of Kurdistan to achieve independence," Barazani said. "From now on, we won't hide that that's our goal. Iraq is effectively partitioned now. Are we supposed to stay in this tragic situation the country's living? It's not me who will decide on independence. It's the people. We'll hold a referendum and it's a matter of months."
The enmity between Kurdish MPs and legislators aligned with the beleaguered prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, flared quickly in the brief parliament session, with a Maliki MP angrily remonstrating with a Kurdish counterpart's demands that salaries which had been frozen by Baghdad be paid.
"Those who tear down the Iraqi flag, we will crush with our shoes," the Maliki MP shouted.
Across nearly all of northern Iraq, the national flag is no longer flying. The Kurds have raised their banner above all former central government buildings in Kirkuk, which their forces took as the Iraqi army fled from the jihadist group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) two weeks ago. In Iraq's west, and some of its centre, Isis has commandeered all government buildings and at least three cities.
Baghdad is caught in a pincer movement between the Kurds and Isis, which have no interest in the state. The Kurds, who have long been cautious about their ambitions for sovereignty, are increasingly acting without restraint as central authority crumbles.
Isis meanwhile has been taunting the state with claims it is imposing a caliphate across a vast tract of land from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala, north-east of Baghdad. The announcement has no practical significance, but shows the potent rise of the jihadist group, and the impotence of Iraq in dealing with it.
Further emphasising the scale of the crisis were death toll figures released by the United Nations on Tuesday, revealing a spike in violence across Iraq in June. The toll of at least 2,417 Iraqis killed and 2,287 wounded in "acts of violence and terrorism" was the highest since April 2007.
"The staggering number of civilian casualties in one month points to the urgent need for all to ensure that civilians are protected," the special representative of the UN secretary general for Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, said.
Ahead of Tuesday's parliamentary session, leaders from the Shia National Alliance list had been backing away from Maliki, who wants a third term as leader. "There is agreement that a less polarising figure emerge," one Shia MP said.
However, Kurdish and Sunni blocs, who have been estranged by the actions of the Iraqi leader for at least the past three years, say they do not trust the Shias to nominate a replacement who would not share Maliki's stance or follow his policies.
Western diplomats in Baghdad fear that Iraq faces near-certain collapse unless politicians from all sides can be convinced that their interests are best served by remaining under central control.
