"With the Shi'ite Islamic Republic of Iran
behind Assad, and Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Muslim states backing
the rebels, Syria could become the arena in which the regional
Sunni-Shi'ite cold war becomes an open-ended civil war with the
potential to destabilize its neighbors - Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and
Jordan. "We most definitely have a
proxy war in Syria," says Ayham Kamel of the Eurasia Group political
risk consultancy. "At this point of the conflict it is difficult not to
say that the international dimension of the Syrian conflict precedes the
domestic one." "Syria is an open
field now. The day after Assad falls you (will) have all of these
different groups with different agendas, with different allegiances,
with different states supporting them yet unable to form a coherent
leadership." What started on March
15, 2011 as an internal uprising against the Assads' repressive 40-year
rule, emulating the revolts that toppled leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, has now been transformed into an arena for foreign meddling."