The threat of the Syrian conflict re-igniting Lebanon’s long-dormant civil war is but one of the nightmares haunting the international community over its failure to keep a lid on what is a strategically placed tinderbox.
The dangers of not acting, of allowing Russia to continue to block any decisive moves towards resolving the conflict, are becoming increasingly clear. Already, jihadist terror groups are moving in to Syria with their own extremist agendas, while smouldering resentment between the Sunni and Shia — including President Assad’s ruling minority of Alawites — is sending sparks across the border into the highly flammable ethnic mix of Lebanon.
President Assad’s habit of blaming all his country’s woes on foreign interventions are textbook dictator-speak, and have been used by every flailing autocrat during the Arab Spring. But like many other of Mr Assad’s prophecies of doom, his words are inadvertently starting to resemble reality. Last week an Iranian general admitted that Iran’s special forces were stationed inside Syria to aid the regime’s crackdown, while foreign jihadists have claimed responsibility for some of the most devastating car bomb attacks on security structures.
The threat of a wider conflagration is real. Sunni monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar are keen to help the rebels — not out of any desire to nurture democracy, but because the collapse of the Assad regime would be a huge blow to Iran — their main rival in the Gulf — and would probably bring to power a new Sunni leadership in Damascus.
Some Iraqi politicians fear that the war may also spill across their frontier, where wounds of the recent Sunni-Shia civil war are still fresh.
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They see their country becoming the frontline of a battle between the Islamist Sunni leaderships emerging from post-revolutionary Arab states and the Shia, under the regional hegemony of Iran and backed by Lebanon’s Hezbollah,