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Sectarian War Threatens to Engulf Southwest Asia

In 2006, the Cheney-Bush Administration initiated a policy of fostering a new form of sectarian warfare in Southwest Asia. The purpose was to divide and conquer the region and use it as a launching pad for greater global wars. President Obama has not only continued that policy, he has amplified it. While Russia and China spoiled the British Empire’s timetable for starting a war against Syria and Iran immediately after Libya, regional assets such as Saudi Arabia and its allies in Lebanon, Turkey, and now Qatar have activated Plan B, by creating a bloody pretext on the streets of Syria for international military intervention.

The plan initiated during the 2006 visit by then Vice President Dick Cheney to Saudi Arabia was to create a Sunni alliance of the Gulf States, Jordan and Egypt, together with Sunni forces in Lebanon, to counter an alleged "Shia Crescent" from Syria to Iran, with Hizbollah in southern Lebanon and Shia groupings in Iraq. The usual tool of choice is the Salafi/Wahhabi militant movement (of which Al-Qaeda is just one asset).

It might sound strange that the same jihadi forces with whom the U.S. is allegedly at war are now allies in the Anglo-American war drive against Syria and Iran. The key to that is called “Anglo-Saudi”. The Anglo-Saudis - whose alliance goes back to British support in the early 20th century for the creation of the Al-Saud/Wahhabi kingdom over most of the Arab Peninsula -- used the jihadist movement to fight Russia in Afghanistan and the Caucasus, and conveniently attacked the U.S. itself on September 11, 2001, to start the global war on terrorism which is continuing to destroy nations in South Asia and Southwest Asia.

The recent suicide attacks in the Syrian capital and in Iraq carry the hallmarks of Salafi suicide bombing terror. Simultaneously, the so-called Syrian Free Army, with Saudi, Qatar, and Turkish backing, is targeting Alawite security and political forces, to give the conflict a sectarian character. Although dominated by the Alawite Assad family connections, the Syrian government and the ruling Baath Party are secular and socialist. Their relationship to Iran is not based on religious interests but strategic ones. Syria is a long-time supporter of the nominally Sunni Palestinian Hamas.

The Saudi state-run media such as the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat have made no secret of this intention, and are helping Salafi propagandists prepare the ideological ground for such an escalation. One such example is the interview posted on Jan. 2 with Omar Bakri, the leader of Al-Muhajiroon who was allowed to leave London by the authorities in 2007 to avoid arrest according to U.S. anti-terror demands, and to settle in Trablus, Lebanon. Al-Muhajiroon was a propaganda, recruitment and fundraising organization in London for the Jihad war against the Russians in the Caucasus. In the Asharq Al-Awsat interview, Bakri calls the Assad regime and its allies in Iran and Hizbollah kafirs (disbelievers), and says that violence is the only legitimate means to overthrow that regime.

Two days later, the same daily published an interview with a "Salafi fighter" who admitted that he moved back and forth from the Sunni-dominated area in northern Lebanon where Bakri is active and that he was participating in attacks on Alawite security personnel specifically. He states openly that the Salafi movement is the spearhead of the armed targeting of the Syrian government.

This same fighter admits in the interview that the Salafi militia's spiritual and political leader is Sheikh Adnan Al-Aroor, a Syrian Salafi cleric who sends his orders to his fighters in Syria by video from his residence in the Saudi capital Riyadh. Another field leader, he said, is Luay Al-Zoubi, a former jihadist in Afghanistan who is residing in northern Lebanon. Al/Zoubi himself was interviewed in Asharq Al-Awsat on Sept. 26 2011, when he indicated his support for the military operations in Syria and declared that his main enemies are Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khamenei and Hizbollah.

Likewise, such propaganda has been used to justify sending terrorists from Saudi Arabia into Iraq to fight the "blasphemist Shia", killing civilians indiscriminately. This sectarian targeting has been intensified inside Iraq as the country's fragile political system established after the Anglo-American invasion in 2003 is right now falling apart along sectarian lines.

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