Syria is increasingly becoming a battleground for Iraq's internal politics as Sunni and Shia elements from Iraq join the fray on opposite sides.

The influx of Sunni militants into Syria from across its eastern border has been widely reported, but we have heard far less about their Shia equivalent who are fighting in support of the Assad regime.

A report in the New York Times compiles some of the evidence:

"Dozens of Iraqis are joining us, and our brigade is growing day by day," Ahmad al-Hassani, a 25-year-old Iraqi fighter, said by telephone from Damascus. He said that he arrived there two months ago, taking a flight from Tehran.

According to the report, Iran is facilitating this influx and, to some extent, encouraging it:

According to interviews with Shiite leaders here [in Baghdad], the Iraqi volunteers are receiving weapons and supplies from the Syrian and Iranian governments, and Iran has organised travel for Iraqis willing to fight in Syria on the government’s side.

Iran has also pressed the Iraqis to organise committees to recruit young fighters. Such committees have recently been formed in Iraq’s Shiite heartland in the south and in Diyala Province, a mixed province north of Baghdad.

While some recruits fly to Damascus via Tehran, others arrive in Syria on "pilgrimage" buses. "While the buses do carry pilgrims, Iraqi Shiite leaders say, they are also ferrying weapons, supplies and fighters to aid the Syrian government," the report says.

Abu Mohamed, an official in Babil Province with the Sadrist Trend, a political party aligned with the populist Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, said he recently received an invitation from the Sadrists’ leadership to a meeting in Najaf to discuss a pilgrimage to the shrine of Sayyida Zeinab, a holy Shiite site in Damascus.

"We knew that this is not the real purpose because the situation is not suitable for such a visit," he said. "When we went to Najaf, they told us it’s a call for fighting in Syria against the Salafis," ultraconservative Sunni Muslims.

A senior Sadrist official and former member of parliament, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that convoys of buses from Najaf, ostensibly for pilgrims, were carrying weapons and fighters to Damascus.

These fighters probably see themselves as defending Shia interests in Syria rather than directly supporting Assad. Juan Colewrites on his blog:

During the Iraq War, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fled to Syria, and Shiite Iraqis congregated around the shrine. They have largely been ethnically cleansed by hard line Sunnis, seen as foreigners supporting the al-Assad regime, and there are concerns that Wahhabi-influenced Salafis might raze the shrine [of Sayyida Zeinab]. 

By way of background, Cole adds:

Saudi Wahhabis, like early militant Protestants in 16th-century Europe, are iconoclasts who despise the cult of saints, shrines and relics, insisting that only God is holy, and no intercession is possible with Him by third parties. Shiite Muslims, in contrast, are all about saints related to the Prophet Muhammad, and their tombs and shrines, and do believe they will intercede for believers.

Meanwhile, in Iraq itself, AP reports that at least 40 people died on Saturday in a series of attacks primarily directed at the Shia community. Although sectarian violence of this kind is nothing new in Iraq, Cole thinks "it may be continuing in force in part because of the new struggle over the future of Syria".

In a post on the Syria Comment blog, Joshua Landis goes further and suggests that spillover from Syria is affecting Iraq much more than its western neighbour, Lebanon.

As far as Lebanon is concerned, Landis argues plausibly that "spillover" events in Lebanon get more media coverage because there are more western journalists in Beirut than Baghdad. Also, he says, "the threat of spillover in Lebanon is minor compared to Iraq because the sects in Lebanon all acknowledge that none can rule the country without the others". 

Even the most powerful, the Shiites, readily confess that they have no chance of turning Lebanon into an Islamic republic because Lebanon has a form of democracy and the majority is against it. Not only do all the sects buy into the notion of power-sharing, they also know that in Lebanon it is impossible for one group to dominate on the others. They learned these simple truths from decades of barbaric fighting ...

Unlike Lebanon, the various sects of Iraq have not found a modus vivendi. Relations between Kurds and Arabs in Iraq are becoming more vexed as Kurdistan takes ever more steps to assert its independence from Arab Iraq.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 29 October 2012