BEIRUT, Lebanon — The images of
recent days have an eerie familiarity,
as if the horrors of the past decade
were being played back: masked
gunmen recapturing the Iraqi cities
of Falluja and Ramadi, where so
many American soldiers died fighting
them. Car bombs exploding amid the
elegance of downtown Beirut. The
charnel house of Syria’s worsening
civil war.
But for all its echoes, the bloodshed
that has engulfed Iraq, Lebanon and
Syria in the past two weeks exposes
something new and destabilizing: the
emergence of a post-American
Middle East in which no broker has
the power, or the will, to contain the
region’s sectarian hatreds.
Amid this vacuum, fanatical Islamists
have flourished in both Iraq and
Syria under the banner of Al Qaeda,
as the two countries’ conflicts amplify
each other and foster ever-deeper
radicalism. Behind much of it is the
bitter rivalry of two great oil powers,
Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose rulers
— claiming to represent Shiite and
Sunni Islam, respectively — cynically
deploy a sectarian agenda that makes
almost any sort of accommodation a
heresy.
“I think we are witnessing a turning
point, and it could be one of the
worst in all our history,” said Elias
Khoury, a Lebanese novelist and
critic who lived through his own
country’s 15-year civil war. “The
West is not there, and we are in the
hands of two regional powers, the
Saudis and Iranians, each of which is
fanatical in its own way. I don’t see
how they can reach any entente, any
rational solution.”
The drumbeat of violence in recent
weeks threatens to bring back the
worst of the Iraqi civil war that the
United States touched off with an
invasion and then spent billions of
dollars and thousands of soldiers’
lives to overcome.
With the possible withdrawal of
American forces in Afghanistan
looming later this year, many fear
that an insurgency will unravel that
country, too, leaving another
American nation-building effort in
ashes.
The Obama administration defends
its record of engagement in the
region, pointing to its efforts to
resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis and
the Palestinian dispute, but
acknowledges that there are limits.
“It’s not in America’s interests to
have troops in the middle of every
conflict in the Middle East, or to be
permanently involved in open-ended
wars in the Middle East,” Benjamin J.
Rhodes, a White House deputy
national security adviser, said in an
email on Saturday.
For the first time since the American
troop withdrawal of 2011, fighters
from a Qaeda affiliate have
recaptured Iraqi territory. In the
past few days they have seized parts
of the two biggest cities in Anbar
Province, where the government,
which the fighters revile as a tool of
Shiite Iran, struggles to maintain a
semblance of authority.
Lebanon has seen two deadly car
bombs, including one that killed a
senior political figure and American
ally.
In Syria, the tempo of violence has
increased, with hundreds of civilians
killed by bombs dropped
indiscriminately on houses and
markets.
Linking all this mayhem is an
increasingly naked appeal to the
atavistic loyalties of clan and sect.
Foreign powers’ imposing agendas on
the region, and the police-state
tactics of Arab despots, had never
allowed communities to work out
their long-simmering enmities. But
these divides, largely benign during
times of peace, have grown steadily
more toxic since the Iranian
revolution of 1979. The events of
recent years have accelerated the
trend, as foreign invasions and the
recent round of Arab uprisings left
the state weak, borders blurred, and
people resorting to older loyalties for
safety.
Arab leaders are moving more
aggressively to fill the vacuum left by
the United States and other Western
powers as they line up by sect and
perceived interest. The Saudi
government’s pledge last week of $3
billion to the Lebanese Army is a
strikingly bold bid to reassert
influence in a country where Iran has
long played a dominant proxy role
through Hezbollah, the Shiite
movement it finances and arms.
That Saudi pledge came just after the
assassination of Mohamad B. Chatah,
a prominent political figure allied
with the Saudis, in a downtown car
bombing that is widely believed to
have been the work of the Syrian
government or its Iranian or
Lebanese allies, who are all fighting
on the same side in the civil war.
Iran and Saudi Arabia have increased
their efforts to arm and recruit
fighters in the civil war in Syria,
which top officials in both countries
portray as an existential struggle.
Sunni Muslims from Egypt, Libya,
Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere
have joined the rebels, many fighting
alongside affiliates of Al Qaeda. And
Shiites from Bahrain, Lebanon,
Yemen and even Africa are fighting
with pro-government militias, fearing
that a defeat for Bashar al-Assad,
Syria’s president, would endanger
their Shiite brethren everywhere.
“Everyone fighting in Syria is fighting
for his own purpose, not only to
protect Bashar al-Assad and his
regime,” said an Iraqi Shiite fighter
who gave his name as Abu Karrar.
He spoke near the Shiite shrine of
Sayida Zeinab near Damascus, where
hundreds of Shiite fighters from
around the region, including trained
Hezbollah commandos, have
streamed to defend a symbol of their
faith.
Some Shiite fighters are trained in
Iran or Lebanon before being sent to
Syria, and many receive salaries and
free room and board, paid for by
donations from Shiite communities
outside of Syria, Abu Karrar said.
Although the Saudi government
waged a bitter struggle with Al
Qaeda on its own soil a decade ago,
the kingdom now supports Islamist
rebels in Syria who often fight
alongside Qaeda groups like the
Nusra Front. The Saudis say they
have little choice: having lobbied
unsuccessfully for a decisive
American intervention in Syria, they
believe they must now back whoever
can help them defeat Mr. Assad’s
forces and his Iranian allies.
For all the attention paid to Syria
over the past three years, Iraq’s slow
disintegration also offers a vivid
glimpse of the region’s bloody
sectarian dynamic. In March 2012,
Anthony Blinken, who is now
President Obama’s deputy national
security adviser, gave a speech
echoing the White House’s rosy view
of Iraq’s prospects after the
withdrawal of American forces.
Iraq, Mr. Blinken said, was “less
violent, more democratic and more
prosperous” than “at any time in
recent history.”
But the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri
Kamal al-Maliki, was already
pursuing an aggressive campaign
against Sunni political figures that
infuriated Iraq’s Sunni minority.
Those sectarian policies and the
absence of American ground and air
forces gave Al Qaeda in Iraq, a local
Sunni insurgency that had become a
spent force, a golden opportunity to
rebuild its reputation as a champion
of the Sunnis both in Iraq and in
neighboring Syria. Violence in Iraq
grew steadily over the following
year.
Rebranding itself as the Islamic State
in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the group
seized territory in rebel-held parts of
Syria, where it now aspires to erase
the border between the two
countries and carve out a haven for
its transnational, jihadist project.
Sending 30 to 40 suicide bombers a
month to Iraq from Syria, it has
mounted a campaign of violence that
has led to the deaths of more than
8,000 Iraqis this year, according to
the United Nations, the highest level
of violence there since 2008.
In recent days, after ISIS fighters
rode into the cities of Falluja and
Ramadi, they fought gun battles with
Sunni tribal fighters backed by the
Iraqi government, illustrating that
the battle lines in the Middle East are
about far more than just sect. Yet the
tribal fighters see the government as
the lesser of two evils, and their
loyalty is likely to be temporary and
conditional.
As the United States rushed weapons
to Mr. Maliki’s government late last
year to help him fight off the jihadis,
some analysts said American officials
had not pushed the Iraqi prime
minister hard enough to be more
inclusive. “Maliki has done
everything he could to deepen the
sectarian divide over the past year
and a half, and he still enjoys
unconditional American support,”
said Peter Harling, a senior analyst at
the International Crisis Group. “The
pretext is always the same: They
don’t want to rock the boat. How is
this not rocking the boat?”
The worsening violence in Iraq and
Syria has spread into Lebanon, where
a local Qaeda affiliate conducted a
suicide bombing of the Iranian
Embassy in Beirut in November, in an
attack meant as revenge for Iran’s
support of Mr. Assad.
More bombings followed, including
one in a Hezbollah stronghold on
Thursday, one day after the
authorities announced the arrest of a
senior Saudi-born Qaeda leader.
“All these countries are suffering the
consequences of a state that’s no
longer sovereign,” said Paul Salem,
vice president of the Middle East
Institute in Washington. “On the
sectarian question, much depends on
the Saudi-Iranian rivalry. Will these
two powers accommodate each other
or continue to wage proxy war?”
For the fighters on the ground, that
question comes far too late. Amjad al-
Ahmed, a Shiite fighter with a pro-
government militia, said by phone
from the Syrian city of Homs, “There
is no such thing as coexistence
between us and the Sunnis because
they are killing my people here and
in Lebanon.”
Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut,
Robert F. Worth from Washington,
and Michael R. Gordon from
Jerusalem. Peter Baker contributed
reporting from Washington.
recent days have an eerie familiarity,
as if the horrors of the past decade
were being played back: masked
gunmen recapturing the Iraqi cities
of Falluja and Ramadi, where so
many American soldiers died fighting
them. Car bombs exploding amid the
elegance of downtown Beirut. The
charnel house of Syria’s worsening
civil war.
But for all its echoes, the bloodshed
that has engulfed Iraq, Lebanon and
Syria in the past two weeks exposes
something new and destabilizing: the
emergence of a post-American
Middle East in which no broker has
the power, or the will, to contain the
region’s sectarian hatreds.
Amid this vacuum, fanatical Islamists
have flourished in both Iraq and
Syria under the banner of Al Qaeda,
as the two countries’ conflicts amplify
each other and foster ever-deeper
radicalism. Behind much of it is the
bitter rivalry of two great oil powers,
Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose rulers
— claiming to represent Shiite and
Sunni Islam, respectively — cynically
deploy a sectarian agenda that makes
almost any sort of accommodation a
heresy.
“I think we are witnessing a turning
point, and it could be one of the
worst in all our history,” said Elias
Khoury, a Lebanese novelist and
critic who lived through his own
country’s 15-year civil war. “The
West is not there, and we are in the
hands of two regional powers, the
Saudis and Iranians, each of which is
fanatical in its own way. I don’t see
how they can reach any entente, any
rational solution.”
The drumbeat of violence in recent
weeks threatens to bring back the
worst of the Iraqi civil war that the
United States touched off with an
invasion and then spent billions of
dollars and thousands of soldiers’
lives to overcome.
With the possible withdrawal of
American forces in Afghanistan
looming later this year, many fear
that an insurgency will unravel that
country, too, leaving another
American nation-building effort in
ashes.
The Obama administration defends
its record of engagement in the
region, pointing to its efforts to
resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis and
the Palestinian dispute, but
acknowledges that there are limits.
“It’s not in America’s interests to
have troops in the middle of every
conflict in the Middle East, or to be
permanently involved in open-ended
wars in the Middle East,” Benjamin J.
Rhodes, a White House deputy
national security adviser, said in an
email on Saturday.
For the first time since the American
troop withdrawal of 2011, fighters
from a Qaeda affiliate have
recaptured Iraqi territory. In the
past few days they have seized parts
of the two biggest cities in Anbar
Province, where the government,
which the fighters revile as a tool of
Shiite Iran, struggles to maintain a
semblance of authority.
Lebanon has seen two deadly car
bombs, including one that killed a
senior political figure and American
ally.
In Syria, the tempo of violence has
increased, with hundreds of civilians
killed by bombs dropped
indiscriminately on houses and
markets.
Linking all this mayhem is an
increasingly naked appeal to the
atavistic loyalties of clan and sect.
Foreign powers’ imposing agendas on
the region, and the police-state
tactics of Arab despots, had never
allowed communities to work out
their long-simmering enmities. But
these divides, largely benign during
times of peace, have grown steadily
more toxic since the Iranian
revolution of 1979. The events of
recent years have accelerated the
trend, as foreign invasions and the
recent round of Arab uprisings left
the state weak, borders blurred, and
people resorting to older loyalties for
safety.
Arab leaders are moving more
aggressively to fill the vacuum left by
the United States and other Western
powers as they line up by sect and
perceived interest. The Saudi
government’s pledge last week of $3
billion to the Lebanese Army is a
strikingly bold bid to reassert
influence in a country where Iran has
long played a dominant proxy role
through Hezbollah, the Shiite
movement it finances and arms.
That Saudi pledge came just after the
assassination of Mohamad B. Chatah,
a prominent political figure allied
with the Saudis, in a downtown car
bombing that is widely believed to
have been the work of the Syrian
government or its Iranian or
Lebanese allies, who are all fighting
on the same side in the civil war.
Iran and Saudi Arabia have increased
their efforts to arm and recruit
fighters in the civil war in Syria,
which top officials in both countries
portray as an existential struggle.
Sunni Muslims from Egypt, Libya,
Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere
have joined the rebels, many fighting
alongside affiliates of Al Qaeda. And
Shiites from Bahrain, Lebanon,
Yemen and even Africa are fighting
with pro-government militias, fearing
that a defeat for Bashar al-Assad,
Syria’s president, would endanger
their Shiite brethren everywhere.
“Everyone fighting in Syria is fighting
for his own purpose, not only to
protect Bashar al-Assad and his
regime,” said an Iraqi Shiite fighter
who gave his name as Abu Karrar.
He spoke near the Shiite shrine of
Sayida Zeinab near Damascus, where
hundreds of Shiite fighters from
around the region, including trained
Hezbollah commandos, have
streamed to defend a symbol of their
faith.
Some Shiite fighters are trained in
Iran or Lebanon before being sent to
Syria, and many receive salaries and
free room and board, paid for by
donations from Shiite communities
outside of Syria, Abu Karrar said.
Although the Saudi government
waged a bitter struggle with Al
Qaeda on its own soil a decade ago,
the kingdom now supports Islamist
rebels in Syria who often fight
alongside Qaeda groups like the
Nusra Front. The Saudis say they
have little choice: having lobbied
unsuccessfully for a decisive
American intervention in Syria, they
believe they must now back whoever
can help them defeat Mr. Assad’s
forces and his Iranian allies.
For all the attention paid to Syria
over the past three years, Iraq’s slow
disintegration also offers a vivid
glimpse of the region’s bloody
sectarian dynamic. In March 2012,
Anthony Blinken, who is now
President Obama’s deputy national
security adviser, gave a speech
echoing the White House’s rosy view
of Iraq’s prospects after the
withdrawal of American forces.
Iraq, Mr. Blinken said, was “less
violent, more democratic and more
prosperous” than “at any time in
recent history.”
But the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri
Kamal al-Maliki, was already
pursuing an aggressive campaign
against Sunni political figures that
infuriated Iraq’s Sunni minority.
Those sectarian policies and the
absence of American ground and air
forces gave Al Qaeda in Iraq, a local
Sunni insurgency that had become a
spent force, a golden opportunity to
rebuild its reputation as a champion
of the Sunnis both in Iraq and in
neighboring Syria. Violence in Iraq
grew steadily over the following
year.
Rebranding itself as the Islamic State
in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the group
seized territory in rebel-held parts of
Syria, where it now aspires to erase
the border between the two
countries and carve out a haven for
its transnational, jihadist project.
Sending 30 to 40 suicide bombers a
month to Iraq from Syria, it has
mounted a campaign of violence that
has led to the deaths of more than
8,000 Iraqis this year, according to
the United Nations, the highest level
of violence there since 2008.
In recent days, after ISIS fighters
rode into the cities of Falluja and
Ramadi, they fought gun battles with
Sunni tribal fighters backed by the
Iraqi government, illustrating that
the battle lines in the Middle East are
about far more than just sect. Yet the
tribal fighters see the government as
the lesser of two evils, and their
loyalty is likely to be temporary and
conditional.
As the United States rushed weapons
to Mr. Maliki’s government late last
year to help him fight off the jihadis,
some analysts said American officials
had not pushed the Iraqi prime
minister hard enough to be more
inclusive. “Maliki has done
everything he could to deepen the
sectarian divide over the past year
and a half, and he still enjoys
unconditional American support,”
said Peter Harling, a senior analyst at
the International Crisis Group. “The
pretext is always the same: They
don’t want to rock the boat. How is
this not rocking the boat?”
The worsening violence in Iraq and
Syria has spread into Lebanon, where
a local Qaeda affiliate conducted a
suicide bombing of the Iranian
Embassy in Beirut in November, in an
attack meant as revenge for Iran’s
support of Mr. Assad.
More bombings followed, including
one in a Hezbollah stronghold on
Thursday, one day after the
authorities announced the arrest of a
senior Saudi-born Qaeda leader.
“All these countries are suffering the
consequences of a state that’s no
longer sovereign,” said Paul Salem,
vice president of the Middle East
Institute in Washington. “On the
sectarian question, much depends on
the Saudi-Iranian rivalry. Will these
two powers accommodate each other
or continue to wage proxy war?”
For the fighters on the ground, that
question comes far too late. Amjad al-
Ahmed, a Shiite fighter with a pro-
government militia, said by phone
from the Syrian city of Homs, “There
is no such thing as coexistence
between us and the Sunnis because
they are killing my people here and
in Lebanon.”
Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut,
Robert F. Worth from Washington,
and Michael R. Gordon from
Jerusalem. Peter Baker contributed
reporting from Washington.
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