Religious Warfare Now Haunts Syria

Religious Warfare Haunts Syria's Villages: Dispatch -- The Telegraph

Religious groups that have lived peacefully together for generations have been plunged into savage local conflicts, as The Sunday Telegraph discovered in villages deep inside Latakia Province.

Perched on a hillside amid the forests, streams and waterfalls of Syria's Latakia province, the village of Beit Swelheh was once a place of harmony.

By day, Abo Mohamed al-Shokri, a Sunni resident of the village, would share lifts to work with his Alawite neighbours, and by night they would smoke shisha pipes together, sitting under starlit skies and listening to the call of the crickets.

"Before the war I had a brilliant relationship with my Alawite neighbours," said Mr Shokri, 40. "We were very friendly to each other, and spent much time in each other's homes".

Today, however, 21 months since the conflict in Syria began, the village is all but destroyed, a casualty of the sectarian hatred that the war has ignited between Syria's majority Sunni population and President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite minority.

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My Comment: The Sunni-Shiite conflict goes back to the beginning of Islam. The only difference between then and now is that both sides are now using modern weaponry.