“The last time I came here, much of the rebel fury was reserved for Alawite Muslims, the minority offshoot of Shiite Islam from which the Assad family and many of the regime’s senior functionaries and paramilitaries are drawn. This year, however, the Shiites themselves are the enemy. A television in the corner is blaring footage of the daily sectarian violence in neighboring Iraq, most of it directed against Shiites, and I ask Aleh, a wiry young man sitting beside me, whether he really wants Syria to end up like that. “I want it and I don’t want it. I don’t want it because it will kill very many. But the Shiites must understand that they don’t own Syria or Iraq. A very bad war is coming.” But surely, I say, he’s only talking about the irregular paramilitaries of the shabiha and not an entire religious group? “We don’t like all the Shiites, because all of them are killing us,” he insists. “They say bad things about our Prophet. When I kill a man in the Syrian Army, I am sad. But I enjoy killing Shiites or Alawites.”……………….”

Before Iraq and before this so-called misnamed Arab Spring, our region has not heard or practiced such sectarian venom in more than a thousand years. Killing by identity was limited to brief spurts of civil strife in places like Lebanon. Slitting of throats and beheading by identity is almost like something new from the 21st century.
That is what foreign intervention, all foreign intervention, on both sides, has done to Syria.
That is what foreign money and fighters and ideology and hatred and weapons have done. And the end is not in sight. The Syrian tunnel is dark and it is growing longer as it twists until it becomes a dark regional tunnel.
Cheers
mhg