BEIRUT — Al-Qaeda is positioning itself as a vanguard defending the Sunni community against what it sees as persecution by Shiite-dominated governments across Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.
As a result, a Syrian rebellion whose aim was the removal of President Bashar Assad is evolving into something both bigger and more ambiguous: a fight increasingly led by Sunni jihadis who are determined to create an Islamic state.
Battling these extremists is a coalition that includes moderates who are horrified that their rebellion in Syria has been discredited, with parts of the country falling under strict religious law.
For moderates in the Middle East, the renewed assertiveness of the extremists is taking on the aspect of a regional calamity.
“The war in Syria has poured gasoline on a raging fire in Iraq, and conflicts in both countries are feeding upon one another and complicating an already complex struggle,” said Fawaz A. Gergez, director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics. “Now the reverberations of the Syria war are being felt on Arab streets, particularly Iraq and Lebanon, and are aggravating Sunni-Shiite tensions across the Arab Middle East.”
Why now? Experts see a fundamental al-Qaeda characteristic of feeding on social, religious and ideological cleavages — of the kind that have been exposed in the Sunni-Shiite divide in Syria.
It is fed by a vicious circle hugely frustrating to the moderate mainstream rebels: the more the West shows reluctance to intervene — fearful that helping them means also aiding global jihad even indirectly — the more there is a void for the jihadis to step into, capitalizing on the widening sectarian schism to recruit new fighters.
The al-Qaeda-linked group that calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has made no secret of its desire to turn Syria’s civil war into a regional conflagration that would allow it to take firmer root. Its very name, rebranded last year from the more-local Islamic State of Iraq, spells out its cross-border ambitions.
Even as its fighters were busy seizing territory in Syria, it has been dramatically escalating its operations inside Iraq, carrying out mass-casualty attacks and staging audacious prison breaks that freed more than 500 inmates. Last week, fighters of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant overran the city of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi.
Ahmad Moussali, a professor of political studies at the American University of Beirut, said the vacuum left by the U.S. in 2011 in Iraq and the beginning of the uprising in Syria has led al-Qaeda to see in Syria and Iraq an arena for war.
“This is why we are seeing today the congregation of all sorts of al-Qaeda-type groups as well as other radical groups coming to Syria and Iraq as well as Lebanon today, and the danger is that these groups have been getting a lot of success,” he said.
