Iraq revives Sunni-Shia tensions among neighbours

DUBAI: For Sunni-ruled Gulf states, seeing Iraq fall under Shia influence after the 2003 US-led war that ousted Iraqi military dictator Saddam Hussein was shocking enough.

Now they fear that rising tensions between Iraq’s disgruntled Sunni minority and Shia majority will erupt into all-out civil war that could surge across their borders and rock the fragile balance of power in the region.

From Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, to tiny Bahrain, with a Shia majority, Gulf rulers are facing a reality they spent decades striving to ignore.

“This Shia-Sunni tension is spilling into the region,” Dubai-based analyst Mustafa Alani told Reuters. “If the Shias of Iraq can come to power, Shias next door in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait feel why can’t they do the same.”

When Shia parties won elections in January to dominate Iraq’s government it was the first time in more than 800 years that Shias had taken power in a core Arab country.

The Shia-led government is a prime target for Sunni Arab insurgents and foreign militants, such as Iraq’s Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who has declared all-out war on Shias.

“The most dangerous phenomenon is not the war between Sunni insurgents and American forces in Iraq but the Sunni-Shia sectarian strife,” said Saudi reformist Mansour Nogaidan.

Saudi Arabia, the leading Sunni power in the Gulf, this month sounded the alarm, warning that Iraq was heading toward disintegration and raising fears of a wider conflict.

Its concern is shared by other regional governments, some of which also have Shia minorities emboldened by the seismic shift in the power balance between Islam’s two main sects.

“The neighbouring countries are terrified of Shias and Iranian expansion. The biggest fear lies in Saudi Arabia which holds the banner of Sunni Islam,” said Nogaidan.

“For them the the biggest danger is losing the influence of Sunni Islam to Shia Islam,” he added.

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, whose country and other Sunni Gulf states backed Saddam in his 1980-88 war against Iran, expressed Riyadh’s concerns in blunt terms on Sunday.

“The growing fear of an outbreak of a sectarian civil war in Iraq is not a chimera but a trend that is becoming clearer day after day,” he said after a meeting of Arab foreign ministers.

“We believe that interfering in Iraq threatens a wider conflict in the region... History will never forgive those who used the tragedy of Iraq to serve their vested interests.

“Stoking the fire of sectarian discord and civil strife will be a calamity for all,” the Saudi foreign minister said.

Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabor, a Shia, attacked Faisal for his previous remarks on Iran’s role, saying Baghdad would not be lectured by “some Bedouin riding a camel”.

He said Saudi Arabia treated its own Shias as “third-class citizens”. Saudi Shias, believed to make up 30 per cent of the kingdom’s native population of 17 million, complain they are marginalised by a government allied to purist Wahhabi Sunni scholars who consider Shiaism a heresy.

Iran has denied it is interfering in Iraq, but it has close ties to the new Iraqi leadership, dominated by Shia parties that found refuge in Iran during Saddam’s rule.

Diplomats and analysts say Iran also wields religious influence over Iraqi clerics and has access to military intelligence through the Badr Brigades, established by Iranian Revolutionary Guards as the military wing of the biggest Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Animosity between Sunnis and Shias goes back to a centuries-old religious schism that still poisons relations.

Hardline Sunnis regard Shias as “rejectionists” who strayed from true Islam. Until recently Gulf states banned Shias from performing religious rituals in public. In some countries they are denied government and security jobs.

After Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini swept to power in Iran in 1979, Western and Gulf states supported Saddam, a Sunni, in his eight-year war against the “export” of the Islamic Revolution.

For years Arab leaders put up with Saddam’s policies simply because they saw him as a guarantee against Shia power.

When the West and the region turned against Saddam after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, prominent US allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia opposed finishing off the Iraqi leader after the 1991 Gulf war, fearing the Shias would step into the vacuum.

The Saudis now believe US policy in Iraq is widening sectarian divisions and effectively handing the country to Iran.

“They (Americans) gave Iraq to Iran on a gold plate free of charge. They did what Khomeini failed to achieve. He must be celebrating in his grave, thanking the Americans,” Alani said.—Reuters

Odds favour becoming overweight in lifetime

NEW YORK: If you aren’t overweight now, you probably will be, according to data from the Framingham Heart Study, the ongoing look at the health of Americans in one Massachusetts community.

The latest analysis shows that the likelihood of a 30-year-old person being or ever becoming overweight is 74 per cent for women and 92 per cent for men. The corresponding risks for becoming very overweight (i.e., obese) were 39 per cent and 48 per cent.

Although overweight and obesity generate a lot of research and media attention, the short- and long-term risks of developing these problems were unknown, the study’s authors note in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The study included 4117 white men and women who were followed from 1971 to 2001. Overweight and obesity were defined as body mass indices (BMI) of at least 25 and 30, respectively.

BMI measures weight in relation to height. It’s calculated as weight in kilograms, divided by the square of height in meters — and a calculator can be found at http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/bmi/calc-bmi.htm.

In the short term (4 years), between 14 per cent and 19 per cent of women became overweight, as did 26 per cent to 30 per cent of men, Dr. Ramachandran S. Vasan and colleagues report. The short-term rates of obesity were 5 to 7 per cent for women and 7 to 9 per cent for men.

In the long term (30 years), over 50 per cent of subjects became overweight and more than 25 per cent became obese. The risk of developing severe obesity (BMI of at least 35) was greater than 10 per cent.

“The lifetime risk for overweight approaches that for high blood pressure and exceeds that described for most other chronic diseases,” Vasan’s team notes. “These estimates suggest that the future burden of obesity-associated chronic diseases may be substantial.”—Reuters