Is a Sunni-Shi'ite thirty years war looming?

  Iason Athanasiadis

Sunnis fighting Shi'ites on Beirut's streets, a civil war in Iraq and political infighting in the Palestinian territories that is externally directed from Riyadh and Tehran: a snapshot of the new, sectarian Middle East.

A US-led, Israel-backed, Middle East-wide alliance of conservative Sunni and secular Muslim states is being marshaled against Iran and its allies on a backdrop of escalating confrontation between Tehran and Washington. After several months of faint rumblings, the Sunni axis is starting to take shape to a chorus of increasingly shrill condemnations by the Iranian theocracy of what it believes is an insidious policy aimed at dividing the region, the better for Washington to dominate it.

"The US and Zionist regime have a conspiracy to stir up conflict between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims in order to plunder the wealth of the regional nations," said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad this week. His statement followed a similar warning by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who made a rare public appearance on the occasion of Aid-e Ghorban (Eid al-Adha) earlier this month following a spate of rumors that he had succumbed to illness.

The new Middle East cold war is being fought in diverse battlefields from Baghdad through Beirut to Gaza between proxies loyal to Tehran and Riyadh. In Lebanon, the CIA is authorized to covertly prop up the Lebanese government through funding anti-Hizballah groups and paying activists to support beleaguered Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. The Daily Telegraph reported that this is part of a secret plan by US President George W. Bush to help the Lebanese government prevent the spread of Iranian influence. On Tuesday, Hizballah loyalists took to the streets of Beirut and engaged in fighting with other factions in some of the worst sectarian fighting since the Lebanese civil war ended in 1990.

Even in Sudan, the echoes of the Sunni-Shi'ite conflict reverberate. In December, Sunni groups Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyyah and Majles al-Dawa demanded the closure of three Iranian cultural centers and expressed fears of Iranian-backed plans to spread Shi'ite beliefs in the country. For their part, Iranian diplomats are concerned by what they call US attempts to use an upcoming referendum on South Sudan by its majority Christian inhabitants to create a pro-US Christian secessionist state in the fault-line between Muslim and Christian East Africa.

This week, the anti-Iranian alliance stretched east to embrace Pakistan as General Pervez Musharraf journeyed to the Egyptian beach resort of Sharm al-Sheikh for talks with President Hosni Mubarak. In a previous stop in Riyadh, Musharraf vowed to deepen defense and strategic ties with the Wahhabi kingdom. His trip, according to the Saudi-owned, Arabic-language news-site Elaph, was intended to "expand the Sunni alliance which includes Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to include Pakistan as well in order to face the growing Iranian influence in the region."

How quickly the Middle East landscape has changed, once again.

It all started in the dying hours of 2006, as former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was led to the gallows in a grimy Baghdad cell that served as a torture chamber during his reign. To catcalls and taunts, Hussein began reciting the fatiha. On the second repetition, and just as he was uttering the name of the Muslim prophet, he was interrupted by his own death. His execution and its timing--on the day when Sunni Muslims mark the holiest feast in the Muslim calendar--was more toxic for Sunni-Shi'ite relations in Iraq and across the region than even the bombing of Samara's Golden Mosque in February 2006--the previously commonly-accepted tipping point into civil war.

As Arab news channels began grainy replays of the unauthorized camera footage that revealed the execution to have been not so much dignified as gleefully revengeful, a news-blackout held in Tehran. Iranians were left uninformed by their national broadcaster that Hussein's dying curse had condemned America and--in place of Israel--Iran. They were clueless that they were being described in the Middle East by epithets such as the "Eastern tide", "Safavids" (the 16th century Persian empire that adopted Shi'ite Islam as the state dogma) and the "Persian menace".

Meanwhile, Arab commentators raged at the perceived insult of executing an Arab nationalist leader on the holiest of Muslim feasts. Al-Jazeera provided coverage of pro-Saddam Hussein wakes in Fallujah and Cairo and screened a report from a village in the Nile Delta whose inhabitants--many of whom had made fortunes as migrant workers in Hussein's Iraq--had renamed it Saddamiyyah out of sympathy with the departed Iraqi leader. In Detroit, a wave of revenge vandalism hit businesses owned by Shi'ite Iraqis.

"Do the obnoxious sectarian slogans that we heard the moment that Saddam collapsed on the noose and which we all have in our pockets via Bluetooth require us to reconsider our neutrality vis-a-vis the Safavid sectarian futility?" wrote Ali Saad al-Mussa, a professor at Saudi Arabia's King Khalid University and a regular writer for al-Watan, a pro-government daily. "They hastened the sacrifice for many reasons, the simplest of which is to celebrate the victory that came 1,000 years late."

Saudi Arabia is a staunchly Sunni country whose Shi'ite minority is mistreated and referred to as 'ar-Rafidin' (the rejectionists). Despite an opening made by King Abdullah in 1998, when he went to Tehran in a landmark visit that marked a new beginning in relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, ties have unraveled since the election of Ahmadinezhad in July 2005. The perception that he is an Iranian nationalist with ambitions to take over Iraq and dominate the region has led Riyadh to seek ways of weakening Iran through launching an oil war against its eastern neighbor. The price of oil has tumbled from $70 to under $50 in the past few months and much of this has to do, oil traders say, with a political decision by Sunni Arab oil producers and the US to hurt Iran economically and create a domestic crisis inside the country.

With Iraq's sectarian militants being given the surge treatment and a worried Arab world wanting to administer a purge upon Iran's theocrats, the US is unwittingly or consciously engaging in social engineering on a region-wide scale. In the mid-decades of the 20th century, imperial power Britain wielded a policy of "divide and conquer" to keep its dominions under control. In Egypt, the Christian minority Copts were encouraged to enlist in the police, earning the hostility of their Sunni Muslim fellow citizens. In Cyprus, the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities were encouraged into an antagonistic relationship by Britain's occupation bureaucracy. In 21st century Iraq, ordinary people are outraged at the manner in which the US has insisted on viewing society through the filter of Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish sections, delineating divisions that were dormant.

"One might well be forgiven for surmising that the current thrust of US policy in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world is to exacerbate and instrumentalize Sunni-Shi'ite divisions," says Fred Reed, a specialist on Middle East politics.

With Arab anti-Iranian rhetoric having reached a pitch unprecedented since the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, evidence is mounting that a new Arab-Persian confrontation is unfolding across the region. From Lebanon to Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan to far-flung conflicts such as Somalia and Sudan, a desperate struggle for influence is under way.

With emotions dangerously sharpened and Washington flailing for a strategy that will shift attention away from its role even while maintaining its influence in the region, violence will inexorably spread. Some Iranian academics and former officials are already describing this conflict as another thirty years war that will eventually lead the region to a Muslim version of the Treaty of Westphalia and the modern era. It was the 1648 Peace of Westphalia that finally buried the hatchet between Catholics and Protestants in Europe and brought into being sovereign nation states and the modern international system.

The Westphalian system allowed each state to define its religion. In the process, it created a segregated, sectarianly-cleansed Europe. Such an apocalyptic scenario might eventually make lasting Middle Eastern peace possible but it would also imply that, in a region that gifted the world its three major monotheistic religions, its Muslims have found untenable even the uneasy coexistence that characterized the first 14 centuries of Islam.- Published 25/1/2007 © bitterlemons-international.org

Iason Athanasiadis is an Istanbul-based writer and photographer who lived in Iran from 2004 to 2007.