Iraqi leaders furious over Mubarak’s assertions that civil war is on the doorstep and Shiites first loyalty in Arab states is to Iran.
In an Al Arabiya TV interview Saturday, April 8, the Egyptian president, who rarely speaks about Iraq publicly, warned Iraq`s war of terror could spill over into the entire the Middle East if the US withdraws its troops.
debkafile‘s Exclusive Sources reveal: Arab intelligence chiefs conferred in Cairo urgently and secretly a few hours earlier on ways to put a stop to Iran’s advancing takeover of Iraq. Egyptian intelligence minister Gen. Omar Suleiman called together colleagues of the key Middle East and Gulf Sunni regimes to align positions on the US-Iranian talks opening in Baghdad on Iraq’s future. They fear Tehran will make the running because of the ground Washington lost when on April 4 US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and UK foreign secretary Jack Straw failed to achieve a breakthrough in the stalled Iraqi talks on a national unity government four months after Iraq’s general election.
Present at the Cairo conference were the secret services directors of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco and Turkey. Syria and Lebanon were absent.
Their concern is that a second Shiite power after Iran will rise in Baghdad. This
transformation will boost fundamentalist Islamic forces and the Shiite minorities in all the Arab countries. Hence Mubarak’s warning.
Egypt is worried about the effect on the opposition Muslim Brotherhood; Israel, though not invited to the conference, has much to fear from the impact on the Palestinian Hamas.
Now in government, the Hamas terrorist group has been continuously nurtured by Saudi and Egyptian intelligence as a Sunni barrier against the Shiite Hizballah in Lebanon. However, Hamas’s booming relations with Tehran and the Allawite regime of Damascus (a sect which is closer to the Shia than the Sunna), plus Iran’s creeping penetration of the Palestinian terrorist movement, places Hamas in an advantageous middle position athwart the Sunni and Shiite sects of the region. The Palestinian fundamentalists will gain further clout on the international arena if Iran takes control of the Baghdad regime.