Islam's Brotherhood

"If the world does not agree to support a peaceful solution through dialogue ... then I see no light at the end of the tunnel.
"Neither the opposition nor the regime can finish each other off. The most dangerous thing in this process is that if the opposition is victorious, there will be a civil war in Lebanon, divisions in Jordan and a sectarian war in Iraq."
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq

The Islamic Republic of Iran is funding and arming the Syrian regime. Hezbollah, which has military control of Lebanon is also in Syria, fighting alongside the regime's military and the Iranian Republican Guard. Iraq is now firmly in the corner of the Shia world with its new sponsors in Iran, making a tidy little geographic barricade against Sunni insurgency there. Syria's sponsor Russia is part of that little conspiracy.

The Sunni majority in Syria has revolted against the reigning Shia minority Allawite Baath party of President Bashar al-Assad. Funding the Sunni rebel army and its Sunni political coalition is Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and surreptitiously, the European Union and the United States. With the full knowledge that behind the Sunni rebels there are terrorist groups, well seasoned in combat and well armed, from the Islamic Maghreb.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups lurk in the rebel background, awaiting their opportunity, just as they have done elsewhere, with the result in Egypt that they now form the government. In Jordan the Muslim Brotherhood spoils there too for a confrontation with the Hashemite Kingdom. The choice is the Shia Islamists or the Sunni Islamists.

Peaceful dialogue? Between the virulently rabid Islamist groups on either side? Iraq has its own tensions that have arisen because the Shia majority failed to share governance with the minority Sunni which had formerly under Saddam Hussein's Baath party ruled and oppressed the Shia and the Kurds. Radical Islamist ideologies are represented by both the Shia and the Sunni fundamentalists; each sect detesting the other, and ripe for confrontation.

"There are people who are trying to foment violence in Syria. These countries' histories are intertwined, and so we have concerns about sectarian violence and Iraq, as well.
"All the neighbours are concerned about the spillover. We're doing everything we can to end that violence and provide a future that's more stable for Syria and that would be more stable for Iraq as well", explained Patrick Ventrell, U.S. State Department spokesman.

And good luck with that. It didn't work out all that well with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, unleashing sectarian vitriol and horrendous bloodshed with the Shia feasting on the blood of the Sunnis and the Sunnis returning the compliments in spades. As it is, Iranian arms are transiting Iraq to Syria, so the neutral position that Iraq espouses and its pleas for reasonable accommodation sound rather hollow.

It is anyone's guess whether there will ever exist peaceful accommodation in the Arab world between Sunni and Shia Islamists.  The grotesque spectacle of Arab on Arab, vilification of the Shia by the Sunni and ghastly raids where atrocities are committed against civilian populations demonstrate the thin veneer of civilization and the pacifying effect of sharing a religious faith calling for peace between its members.

The only unifying force between them all, from Turkey to Qatar, Saudi Arabia to Iran, is their shared hatred of the presence of a non-Muslim state in the Middle East, an affront to Islam. And it is toward Israel and its 'oppressive' presence that all the parties in the Middle East hatefest can turn for an accusation-and-cause that they are unable to behave in a civilized manner toward one another.