Tangled Webs

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) gets around, they really do. They obviously believe in getting things done expeditiously without too much fuss. Capture a thousand or so military of an opposition and dispatch them to the nether world and then there's no concern about having to guard them. They've marched from Iraq into Syria to oppose the Syrian Shia-Alawite regime, then turned about and marched right back into Iraq to unseat the Iraqi Shia-led regime with disaffected Sunnis aiding them at every turn.

Saudi Arabia has not only armed and financed the Sunni insurgents in both Syria and Iraq, but it has assembled its forces to protect its own borders; ISIS is like those army ants that stride imperviously through miles and miles of crops and forests to ravenously swallow everything in their path, to stifle and smother whatever cannot move swiftly enough out of their way. In Jordan ISIL/ISIS, the terrorist Islamist group with a double name; Al-Sham/Levant, strides toward Amman.

It appears to be pre-established within Ma'an, a tranquil southern Jordanian city where bearded men in military camouflage jackets and other men wearing long black tunics, the colour of choice for Islamists, shout "Allahu akbar!", unfurling the black flag bearing the symbol of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Members of the Al-Abbas brigades, who volunteered to protect the Shiite Muslim holy sites in Karbala against Sunni militants fighting the Baghdad government, parade in the streets of the Shrine city on June 26, 2014. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki conceded that political measures are needed alongside military action to repel a Sunni insurgent offensive that is threatening to tear Iraq apart. AFP PHOTO/MOHAMMED SAWAF MOHAMMED SAWAF/AFP/Getty Images

Earlier this week Jordanian troops rushed to the border with Iraq to reinforce defences with convoys of tanks, troops and rocket launchers just as the Sunni ISIL militias took control of the official border post on the Iraq side. Radical factions within Jordan's largely Sunni society sympathizing with ISIL's push to depose Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Shiite oppressor of Iraq's Sunnis are prepared to join the disintegration of the Middle East.

That disintegration has been brought to the fore courtesy of many circumstances, none more responsible than the flowering of the "Arab Spring", which the West so applauded, believing it to herald in a new era of democracy and civil rights and freedoms that countries of the Muslim Middle East's citizens so eagerly clamoured for, believing that it would being them wealth and security, as it appeared to when watching U.S. television.

What it did was free sectarian tensions on a low boil to intensify to immensely fiery proportions igniting old resentments and antagonisms that nothing could forestall, thanks to some interventions removing old tyrants whose firm grasp of their societies held them together in mutual fear and traditional loathing. Learning to share never was a high priority in tribal societies for whom the 'other' presented as a provocation and potential risk to their own advantage.

The minority Shiite populations within majority Sunni countries will always be disadvantaged as lesser creatures within the Islamic scale of justice and balance. They simply chose the wrong heir to back and back then, as right now that was rigorously recognized as blasphemy leading to apostasy. The Sunnis who live as minority populations within majority Shiite regimes will never be granted equal citizenship, for they are undeserving, following the wrong Islamic path.

ISIS/ISIL is on the rampage, eager to behead as many Shiites as they can before their scimitars become too dulled to cut through human flesh, sinew and bone. Of course there is always the potential for the United States to intervene, to attempt to halt the slaughter that will continue regardless of what outsiders do or say or threaten. Should outside intervention favour either sect, the terrorist jihadis representing either sect will see it as an invitation to heap their scorn and lethal attacks where it will hurt the intervenors most, at home.

In Pakistan, senior Al-Qaeda would be delighted to disabuse the United States of the notion that they will successfully apprehend all the terrorists that attempt to enter North America and reprise 9/11. In Iran, the Ayatollahs will give additional thought and instruction to Hezbollah and Hamas who have both proven their mettle in infiltrating North American and European society, enabling them to strike should they so desire, anywhere.

So, go ahead make their day; choose carefully, either Sunni or Shiite, and remember the choosing was a matter of free will, and for every action there will be reaction. Caution: wring hands, stay home, send treasure.