"What Iraq’s violent sectarian split means for its neighbors" PBS NewsHour 6/17/2014
Excerpt
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Late this evening in Baghdad, Reuters reports that Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni political leaders, including the prime minister, made a joint call for national unity.
Tonight, we take a closer look at what the Iraq crisis and its sectarian divisions mean for an already volatile region.
I’m joined by Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief of Al-Arabiya News channel, and Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress. But the views she expresses here are her own.
What is the dangerous, Hisham, that the Sunni-Shiite split, which we have become so familiar with now, is going to spread beyond the borders of Iraq throughout the entire region?
HISHAM MELHEM, Al Arabiya News: What we see now in terms of Shia-Sunni rivalry is unprecedented in the history of Islam.
This is the first time we see bloodletting on a continuum front from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon. And if you add to it occasional flare-ups in Bahrain and Yemen, you will get an idea.
This has never happened in modern history, or even any time throughout the history of Islam. That’s why it’s extremely dangerous. When you add to that the fact that you have major Arab countries that are literally unraveling along sectarian ethnic lines, fault lines, Syria and Iraq, you add to that refugee problems in two brittle countries, Lebanon and Jordan, you add to that dearth of leadership in the region, you add to that dearth of leadership in Europe, which makes American leadership extremely important, unfortunately, American leadership also was absent in the last two years.
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