<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/world/middleeast/17shiite.html> January 17, 2007 News Analysis Hangings Fuel Sectarian Split Across Mideast By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO, Jan. 16 — The botched hanging of Saddam Hussein and two lieutenants in Iraq by its Shiite-led government has helped to accelerate Sunni-Shiite sectarianism across an already fragile Middle East, according to experts across the region.
The chaotic executions and the calm with which Mr. Hussein confronted the gallows and mocking Shiite guards have bolstered his image among many of his fellow Sunni Muslims.
But something else is happening too: a pan-Muslim unity that surged after the summer war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia, is waning.
And while political analysts and government officials in the region say the spreading Sunni disillusionment with Shiites and their backers in Iran will benefit Sunni-led governments and the United States, they and others worry that the tensions could start to balkanize the region as they have in Iraq itself.
"The reality of the current situation is that we are approaching an open Sunni-Shiite conflict in the region," said Emad Gad, a specialist in international relations at the government-financed Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "And Egypt will also be a part of it as a part of the Sunni axis. No one will be able to avoid or escape it."
This changing dynamic in the region, described by many scholars, analysts and officials in recent days, is a result not only of the hangings, the Iraq war and the Lebanese political struggle. It has also been encouraged by Sunni-led governments like those in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and some Sunni religious leaders alarmed by the rising influence of Iran, the region's biggest Shiite power. Far from Cairo, in a sprawling farming village in the Nile Delta region north of the city, Hamada Abdullah, a Sunni Muslim, said that after the war between Hezbollah and Israel, he posted a small picture of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, on the bare wall of his home. It did not matter that Sheik Nasrallah was a Shiite Muslim aligned with the Shiite state of Iran.
To Mr. Abdullah, Sheik Nasrallah was first and foremost a bold Arab resistance leader. But since the hanging of Mr. Hussein and since Hezbollah has pushed to topple the Sunni-led government in Lebanon, he has begun to reconsider.
He says he is suspicious of Sheik Nasrallah and his politics. "His whole army in the south of Lebanon, they are Shiites," Mr. Abdullah said. While some American officials and Sunni leaders say that increased tension leads to reduced Iranian influence, others say that sectarian loyalties are difficult to control.
"When Hezbollah did what they did in Lebanon in the summer, no one thought of it as a Shiite party; it was a nationalist party," said Taher Masri, a former prime minister of Jordan. "Now with the events in Iraq culminating in the way Saddam Hussein was executed and the lack of condemnation and total silence of Hezbollah, many people are examining the position of Hezbollah as a Shiite party."
Some of the region's Sunni-led governments and religious leaders used the hanging of Mr. Hussein on a Sunni Muslim holy day as a weapon in the jockeying for regional power.
"Sunni states are using this sectarian card to undercut Iran's influence because they feel that Iran was able to penetrate the Arab world after the fall of Iraq, which was acting as a shield against Iranian influence," said Marwan Kabalan, a political science professor at Damascus University.
Sunnis make up a vast majority of the Islamic world. Shiites, who lead Iran and the Iraqi government, are the next largest sect. The two split over who would lead Islam after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
While the two have theological differences — and similarities — the gathering conflict is being stoked by a determination by Sunni leaders to preserve, or reinvigorate, their waning influence in the region — while emboldened Shiites have pressed for more influence.
After the war between Hezbollah and Israel, Shiite leaders seemed to reach their zenith as an antidote to a Sunni Muslim leadership widely viewed as corrupt, impotent and stooges of the West, analysts said.
Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Sheik Nasrallah of Hezbollah, each won wide followings across the region for their willingness to defy the United States. Hezbollah and its allies pressed for more power in Lebanon and when rebuffed, began demonstrations intended to topple the government.
Now, fueled by state controlled media in many Sunni Muslim states, a divide, or at least an estrangement, is growing across the Middle East between Sunni Muslims and Shiites. Egyptians, for example, are inundated nearly daily with headlines, commentaries and television reports alleging Shiite transgressions.
An Egyptian-government controlled satellite service, called Nilesat, has been broadcasting across the Arab world Al Zawraa, a television station that shows what is billed as heroic footage of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, American soldiers being killed and wounded, and unflattering images of Shiite leaders.
"Raising the ugly face of Shiites, expanding Iranian influence in the region," read a headline in a recent edition of Rose el-Youssef, a pro-government Egyptian newspaper.
In December, a top religious leader close to the Saudi royal family, Abdul Rahman al-Barak, said that Shiites, whom he called rejectionists, were worse than Jews or Christians.
"By and large, rejectionists are the most evil sect of the nation and they have all the ingredients of the infidels," he wrote.
Such talk is causing a creeping sectarian tension, political analysts said. In Mr. Abdullah's village in the Nile Delta region of Egypt, where many people had posted a picture of Sheik Nasrallah, there is a growing sense of disunity with Shiites that mirrors partly what is happening in Iraq. "Saddam Hussein was the one courageous man among Arab leaders," said Ibrahim Mustafa Ibrahim, a school janitor. "We saw how he was executed. We saw everything."
Nada Bakri and Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>