United Press International,
WASHINGTON: The deteriorating situation in Iraq is raising serious concern among its neighbors. While several countries share a border with Iraq — Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — it is the latter, a close U.S. ally in the region that chose to speak out. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal voiced his country's frustration at the way the war is being handled.
“It's a very dangerous situation and a very threatening situation that is going toward disintegration,” he said.
The prince, accompanied by Prince Turki, the new Saudi ambassador to the United States, addressed his worries over the Bush administration's handling of the conflict to a small group of journalists at a meeting in the Royal Saudi Embassy in Washington last week.
Sectarian clashes in Iraq that have been tearing apart the country's Shiite and Sunni communities, have now started affecting Shiites. Rival Shiite groups are starting to fight one another. In recent weeks, there have been clashes between the Mahdi Army, run by the maverick young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and the Badr Brigade, loyal to the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is loyal to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
Warning of the dangers of Iraq breaking up, Faisal said, “All the dynamics are there pressing the people away from each other.” The Saudi prince sees real perils in separating the Iraqi-Arabs, the Shiites from the Sunnis.
From the outset of the war, Faisal said, the Americans have tended to see the Sunnis in Iraq as the enemy. Indeed, most of Saddam's men were Sunnis from towns and villages where after invading the country the United States engaged in an anti-Baathist crusade. Sunnis were kicked out of the army and the civilian administration; their salaries were frozen; it was, said the Saudi prince, “an invitation for many to join the resistance.”
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