WASHINGTON, April 12 (UPI) -- The arcane argument about whether a not a state of civil war exists in Iraq between the Sunni and the Shia is suddenly being overtaken by the more worrying prospect that the clash between the two sects may be spreading more widely across the Islamic world.
The death toll in Pakistan rose to 57 Wednesday from the double suicide bombing of the Sunni festival in Karachi to mark the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the blast, which follows a long series of incidents between extremists of the two sects that had Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf this week appealing to Islamic scholars to "raise their voice against terrorism and help curb extremism by checking misuse of places of worship for fanning discord and hatred.
"We have to eliminate terrorism, and all of you should support our efforts in this respect -- we have to develop tolerance and contain extremism," Musharraf said, shortly before the explosion.
And the Arab world was sill reeling from the sudden Shia-Sunni political row that broke out between Egypt and Iraq, whose government boycotted the latest Arab League summit. The Iraqis were protesting the pugnacious interview given to the al-Arabiya TV channel by Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, claiming that Shiites across the Middle East were more loyal to their fellow Shiites in Iran than to their own nations.
"Definitely Iran has influence on Shiites. Shiites are 65 percent of the Iraqis," Mubarak said. "Most of the Shiites are loyal to Iran, and not to the countries they are living in."
Mubarak is not the first to sound the alarm over the prospect of the age-old tensions between Sunnis and Shiites spilling over from Iraq to threaten the stability of the whole Middle East. Jordan's King Abdullah was the first to warn of the emergence of a "Shiite crescent" spreading from Iran and into southern Iraq, into Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast and into the Persian Gulf.
"Iran, as the single Shiite state up to now, has the position and power to lead the Shiite communities in the region. That is big trouble for many of the Sunni countries," warns Professor Edward Gnehm, who until last summer was the U.S. Ambassador in Jordan.
"With our toppling the Sunni-controlled government in Iraq, the Shiites of Iraq are asserting their right to run the country. They are, after all, 60 percent of the population. Iran is right there with money, religious influence, and its power interests. Shiites in other Sunni Arab countries are emboldened to seek their rights. They are a majority in Bahrain and 30 percent of the population in Kuwait. They are 10 percent of the population in Saudi Arabia -- but far more importantly they are the people who live in the oil rich eastern province of Saudi Arabia," Gnehm adds.
The prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon not only changes the balance of power in the Middle East, but also the balance of power between Sunni and Shiites, and has rung alarm bells across the region.
Nawaf Obaid, a security adviser to the Saudi government and a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, warns in a report published by CSIS this week that the Saudi government and its allies must act soon to prevent Iran from consolidating its influence over Iraq.
"Tehran now sees an opportunity to fulfill one of the most cherished aims of the Iranian revolutionary experiment, 'to export the revolution.' More simply stated, it wants to expand the reach of Shiite Islam," Obaid's report said. "The time has arrived ... to open a dialogue with Tehran and to make it clear the kingdom is conscious of their covert activities in Iraq."
At the same time, Obaid urged the Saudi kingdom to use its influence to ensure that the United States did not suddenly withdraw and leave Iraq to its fate, stressing that a swift withdrawal of British and American troops would "precipitate a civil war and an immediate disintegration of the state."
"A civil war (in Iraq) may be inevitable," Obaid went on, in a detailed report based on extensive interviews with security officials across the region. "Such a development would have the gravest implications for the entire region, especially Saudi Arabia, which shares its longest international borders with Iraq. Saudi Arabia has a vested interest in preserving the integrity of Iraq and safeguarding the rights of Sunnis in a country dominated by Shiites."
The Saudi concern, based partly on fears that its own Shiite minority could be attracted to an Iranian-led Shiite resurgence, is shared by other Sunni governments in the region, including Egypt and Jordan. Turkey, which has been holding urgent but discreet consultation with Arab states in recent weeks, fears that a civil war and disintegration of Iraq could lead to an independent Kurdistan, intensifying its own security problems with militant separatists among its Kurdish minority.
It is this context that relatively wealthy countries in the region like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey would be tempted to consider acquiring their own nuclear deterrents were Iran to become a fully fledged nuclear power. This could mean a sectarian Cold War and nuclear standoff across the Middle East and a hair-trigger nuclear balance across the Persian Gulf, source of half the world's oil exports.
The great question here is whether ethnic loyalties triumph over religious ones; whether the Shiites of Iraq feel a closer ethnic loyalty to their fellow Arabs, even though they are Sunni, than they do to the Farsi-speaking Persians of Iran who are their fellow Shiites.
Arab leaders have pushed their own most senior religious figures into heading off the prospect of a wider Sunni-Shiite split. King Abdullah last year convened a major Islamic conference in Jordan to stress the unifying nature of Islam, and the legitimacy of its various Sunni, Shiite and Ibadi branches, and also to issue a common fatwa against terrorism.
Endorsed by all the Islamic states at last December's Organization of Islamic Conference in Mecca, this call has so far had tragically limited effect in Iraq, where the deliberate fomenting of a Sunni-Shiite civil war seems to be the strategic goal of some extremist and jihadist groups -- with potentially devastating implications for the whole Middle East.
