According to the McRINO Brigade we should be joining forces with the Sunni jihadis.
Via Guardian:
Not long after a friend called from Damascus to tell him one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam had been damaged by Syrian rebels, Baghdad student Ammar Sadiq was on the move.
Raging with a desire for vengeance, the 21-year-old set off for the border, a six-hour drive through Iraq’s western deserts. He was one more jihadist on a road to war, a well-trodden path through lands that not long ago were used by jihadists coming the other way. When he got to Syria, however, he did not plan to join the Sunni insurgents now blazing through the north, but the equally vehement Shia groups defending the capital.
“It was like a thunderbolt hit me,” said Sadiq. “My friend was telling me that wahhabis from Saudi and Afghanis were trying to destroy the [Shia] shrine of Sayyida Zeinab. I did not wait even to tell my parents. All I was thinking of is to go to Syria and protect the shrine, though I have not used a weapon in my life.”
Sadiq was trying to join a group named Abu Fadl al-Abbas, which over the past 14 months has emerged as one of the most powerful in Syria.
Interviews with serving and former members of Abu Fadl al-Abbas suggest that upwards of 10,000 volunteers – all of them Shia Muslims, and many from outside Syria – have joined their ranks in the past year alone. The group’s raison d’etre is to be custodian of Shia holy sites, especially Sayyida Zeinab, a golden-domed Damascus landmark, but its role has taken it to most corners of Syria’s war. It is now a direct battlefield rival, both in numbers and power, for Jabhat al-Nusra, the jihadist group that takes a prominent role among opposition fighting groups.
Word of Abu Fadl al-Abbas has spread to Baghdad and elsewhere in the Shia diaspora. Many of its volunteers hail from Iraq’s Shia heartland, where the group started some time last year with a fatwa delivered in Najaf by the renowned cleric Abu al-Qasim al-Ta’ai, who gave religious authority to the Shia going to fight in Syria.
The effect led to a surge of young Iraqis wanting to wage jihad and a groundswell of community support for a sectarian war in a neighbouring state, less than five years after similar bloodletting had ravaged Iraq.
Recruitment centres soon opened; militia leaders who had guided the rampage against the Sunni rebellion from 2004, first against the occupying American army, then against the ancient theocratic foe, were again mobilised. Cadres were called to arms, just as they were in 2006 when al-Qaida in Iraq succeeded – twice – in destroying another holy Shia mosque, the Imam al-Askari shrine in Samarra.