Sunni-Shiite religious war in Iraq feared
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-10 21:07

The stories of endless carnage — of innocent Iraqi civilians killed by Zarqawi's bombers — have repelled many Arabs.

" Saddam Hussein, bin Laden, Zarqawi and whoever thinks like them have set back the Muslim nation 2,000 years!" complained Mohamed Arabiyat, 50, a relative of one young man from Salt who died in the Iraq conflict.

A leading regional scholar believes most young Arabs willing to die in Iraq are already there. "I don't think the reserves of the extremist Islamist groups are very strong any more," said Mohamed el-Sayed Said of Egypt. But others believe Sunni-Shiite bloodletting, an Iraq conflict between Islam's rival branches, may awaken old hatreds and replenish the ranks.

"There are lots of ignorant people who'll want to aid the Sunnis against the Shiites," Mohamed Mehyar, a longtime defense attorney for Islamic militants, said in Amman, Jordan's capital.

Mehyar believes the clergy will caution people, however, that it's "haram" — forbidden — for Muslim to kill Muslim.

In Zarqa, where the minarets of countless mosques rise above the hill-hugging cityscape, people do look to their Sunni sheiks for guidance. And those clerics seem not to view Iraq's violence as "legitimate `jihad'," or holy war, Walid Abu Suwan, 30, said in his housewares shop, near Zarqawi's childhood home.

"I'm convinced and people in this neighborhood are convinced that jihad must be started by fatwa," that is, an edict from the clergy.

In Saudi Arabia last November, 26 prominent clerics did sign such a fatwa, conferring legitimacy on the Iraqi resistance. But in Zarqa, the young merchant said, "there's still no fatwa" — at least not yet.