CAIRO — The Egyptian cleric was in a fervor. With Hezbollah’s Shiite fighters helping Bashar Assad crush Syrian rebels, he wanted to sound the alarm to Sunnis across the Middle East: “Now is the time for jihad.”
Speaking on a Saudi TV station, Sheik Mohammed el-Zoghbi called on “young men in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Kuwait, Jordan, Yemen,” to go to Syria to fight.
“We must all go to purge Syria of this infidel regime, with its Shiites who came from Iran, southern Lebanon and Iraq,” he shouted during an appearance on Al-Khalijiya TV.
The overt entry by Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia in Syria’s civil war on the side of its ally Assad has sharpened sectarian divisions throughout the Middle East.
Fighters from the Shiite guerrilla group helped Syrian forces batter the rebel-held town of Qusair for three weeks until they finally overran it this week in a significant victory for Assad’s regime. Many Sunni hard-liners have taken Hezbollah’s intervention as a declaration of war by Shiites against Sunnis.
That could have dangerous implications not only for Syria’s conflict but for the entire region.
Already several thousand foreign militants — from across the Arab world and as far away as Chechnya and Somalia — are believed to be fighting among the rebels. Some have close ties to al-Qaida. Their presence has been a major reason the United States is reluctant to help arm the rebel movement.
It could also fuel the fires of conflict in Syria’s neighbors. Hezbollah’s intervention threatens to bring that country’s conflict even further into Lebanon, where rebels have vowed to retaliate with attacks on the Shiite group’s home turf. It has also enraged Sunnis in Lebanon, who resent Hezbollah’s political domination in their country and the weak government’s inability to rein them in.
Speaking in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, a founder of the hard-line Sunni Salafi movement in Lebanon, Sheik Islam al-Shahal, said it was time for Sunnis to fight back against what he called Shiite Iran’s control of Lebanon through Hezbollah.
“The (Iranian) occupation of Lebanon must be confronted by preparing every Sunni family and every young Sunni man to defend his faith, his home and his honor. We are clearly targeted,” he said.
Iraq also has seen a dangerous upsurge in tit-for-tat attacks and bombings between Sunnis and Shiites in recent weeks, raising fears of a revival of the sectarian slaughter of 2005-2008. Syria’s conflict is intertwined with Iraq, where al-Qaida’s branch is connected with jihadi fighters in Syria and the two are believed to trade resources. The heightened sectarian tone across the region is likely to fuel Iraq’s Sunni minority to stand up against the country’s Shiite leadership.
