Will Syria’s Conflict Spill Over Into Iraq?

Will Syria’s Conflict Spill Over Into War-Weary Iraq? -- Vivienne Walt, Time

As the violence in Syria spirals into an increasingly bloody maelstrom, Iraq's Foreign Minister voices his country's fears that the chaos is spilling across the border—and that Baghdad won't be able to contain it

For months, Syrian opposition groups have smuggled weapons and fighters into the country across the borders of Turkey and Lebanon. Now another of Syria’s influential neighbors—Iraq—says its territory is being used as a base for al-Qaeda attacks against the regime of President Bashar Assad. Speaking to a handful of reporters in Paris on Thursday morning, Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said both U.S. and Iraq believe that Al Qaeda operatives are sneaking into Syria across Iraq’s western border, despite the fact that the U.S. military during the Iraq War turned that remote desert area into the country’s best-secured frontier. “It is very, very difficult to control 680 kilometers of borders,” Zebari said, claiming that Al Qaeda’s infiltration into Syria was now “a fact.” For jihadis, he said, “Syria is a good environment, because of the lack of security, the lack of control of the government.”

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My Comment: For the moment I do not see a spillover effect .... the focus in the Middle East is on the Syrian civil war. But when the conflict is over .... that is when the problems are going to arise, especially if it is a radical Sunni-Islamist government that comes to power in Damascus.