Sunni-Shia Unrest

Yesterday Middle East expert Robert Fisk was interviewed on Democracy Now! It's worth checking out. He's a prickly guy and his take on Syria is sort of a "pox on both your houses." He says the Syrian government is fighting to win and taking no prisoners. Fisk, who maintains high-level contacts within the Syrian military, casts doubt on Israeli-U.S. claims that the government is using poison gas. He thinks the civil war will most likely continue for another couple of years.

The main Syria story in the paper today is about Secretary of State John Kerry's trip to Moscow where an announcement was made about a peace conference to take place as soon as the end of this month.

Anne Barnard has a story about Hezbollah's widening role in the civil war, leaving me with the impression that momentum is definitely going Assad's way. The Wahhabi rebel groups are Keystone Cops compared to the Party of Allah. The last thing Israel wants is a successful proving ground for Hassan Nasrallah's men. And it's why you can expect more Israeli bombing runs.

But I found that the most enlightening story this morning was Tim Arango's, "Iraq’s Worsening Sunni Protests Revolve Around Antiterrorism Tactics." Sunnis are protesting the Maliki government's continued reliance on a U.S.-created policy of indefinite detention based on a network of confidential informants (a.k.a., a police state). The government's harsh crackdown on the protest camp in Hawija that left 50 dead has exacerbated the fissure between Sunnis and Shiites. And at this point, with a Sunni-Shiite civil war raging next door in Syria, there appears to be no going back:

Now, Iraqis on both sides of the divide say the chance to quell Sunni anger by revising these practices seems to have been lost. Sunni protesters have symbolically set fire to their list of demands. Shiite leaders say reconciliation is politically impossible, given the sectarian polarization set off by the recent violence here and the continuing civil war in Syria, which is increasingly aggravating the region’s sectarian fault lines. 

“To be realistic, in the current environment, there is no support for this,” said Sami al-Askari, a Shiite member of Parliament who is close to the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. “This is the impact of Syria. The whole region is talking about clashes between Sunnis and Shiites.” 

Something greater seems to have been lost here, some Iraqis say, the dream of a sectarian coexistence in which disagreements are contested through politics. The prospect for political blocs comprising Sunnis and Shiites to emerge in advance of next year’s national elections, as they did before the previous vote in 2010, seems far-fetched. 

“The Shiite feeling is that they are under threat,” Mr. Askari said. “The Sunnis feel like they are marginalized. In this environment, it is madness to say, ‘I have a list of Sunnis and Shiites and people will vote for it.’ ”