Sunnis vs. Shiites, America is in the middle.
Eftychis | 13 01 2007If you're a first time visitor, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, which will keep you up to date with all the latest New School Politics posts. Thanks for visiting!
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‘The jihad now is against the Shias, not the Americans’
As 20,000 more US troops head for Iraq, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the only correspondent reporting regularly from behind the country’s sectarian battle lines, reveals how the Sunni insurgency has changed
Saturday January 13, 2007
The Guardian
One morning a few weeks ago I sat in a car talking to Rami, a thick-necked former Republican Guard commando who now procures arms for his fellow Sunni insurgents.
Rami was explaining how the insurgency had changed since the first heady days after the US invasion. “I used to attack the Americans when that was the jihad. Now there is no jihad. Go around and see in Adhamiya [the notorious Sunni insurgent area] - all the commanders are sitting sipping coffee; it’s only the young kids that are fighting now, and they are not fighting Americans any more, they are just killing Shia. There are kids carrying two guns each and they roam the streets looking for their prey. They will kill for anything, for a gun, for a car and all can be dressed up as jihad.”
Read the rest of the article here-
This article furthers my prediction that the war in Iraq will continue to intensify between the Shiites and the Sunni’s as American soldiers find themselves caught in the middle. The violence in Iraq may have initially been directed at American forces; now it is evident that it is a war between two sects of one religion. As the tensions in Iraq grow, it will become more obvious to foreign observers, American military leaders, as well as politicians that the Sunni world is moving ever so slowly towards war with the Shiites. Many note that fighting between the two sects has gone on for hundreds of years, but never has so much been at stake. One aspect of the situation that is particularly troublesome is the proliferation of nuclear weapons by states that will be involved in the future conflict, first Iran, and then soon after Saudi Arabia. The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran does not only concern Israel and the United States, but also Shia nations. Once Iran achieves a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia will be soon to follow. It is a safe bet that the royal family is investing in nuclear arms research already. Many are worried that any possible strike on Iran will aggravate tensions in the region, while many Muslims will be angry, the governments of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt will be willing to turn a blind eye towards any Israeli action. They will do little than publicly condemn possible air strikes. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan have nothing to fear from Israel. Israel does not represent a real threat to them, as they have no interests in dominating the region. On the other hand the modern Islamic Republic of Iran was founded with the interest of not only destroying Israel, but also becoming the dominant power in the region through political, military, and economic means. Saudi Arabia cannot and never will allow this to happen, they are willing to go to war to prevent it.
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The Sunnis vs. Shiites, America is in the middle. by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
