CAIRO: Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi said he had cut all diplomatic ties with Damascus on Saturday as he threw the backing of the most populous Arab state firmly behind the revolt against the Iranian-backed Damascus government.
Mursi urged world powers not to hesitate to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria as President Bashar Assad's forces pushed forward with their offensive against rebels, capturing a suburb near the Damascus international airport on Saturday.
The Islamist head of state had previously appeared somewhat less confrontational toward Assad. But in a speech to Sunni Muslim clerics in Cairo, he said he had cut all ties to Damascus.
“We decided today to entirely break off relations with Syria and with the current Syrian regime,” he said.
He also warned Assad’s allies in the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia to pull back from fighting in Syria: “We stand against Hezbollah in its aggression against the Syrian people,” Mursi said. “Hezbollah must leave Syria — these are serious words. There is no space or place for Hezbollah in Syria.”
Addressing thousands of supporters in a rally later in the day, he said that his government is also withdrawing the Egyptian charge d’affaires from Damascus.
Muslim Brotherhood
On Friday, Mursi's ruling Muslim Brotherhood movement, which had previously reached out across Islam’s sectarian divide, called for jihad.
The Brotherhood accused Shiites of being at the root of sectarian conflicts throughout history and threw its weight behind holy war — just months after a high-profile rapprochement with Iran.
“Throughout history, Sunnis have never been involved in starting a sectarian war,” spokesman Ahmed Aref said, adding that Hezbollah provoked the new sectarian conflict in Syria.
As the United States swung the force of its arms behind the mainly Sunni rebels, calls to jihad from the mosques of Makkah and Cairo could speed weapons, and fighters, into Syria.
And, with anger flaring across the Sunni-Shiite faultline that divides the Middle East, a conflict that has also split world powers along Cold War lines risks spilling over elsewhere.
The Muslim Brotherhood had been “vague” on Syria, said Khalil Al-Anani, an expert on Islamist movements at Washington’s Middle East Institute: “But now they have decided to join the kind of sectarian war against Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.”
Assad, whose dominant Alawite minority is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, says he is fighting to preserve Syria’s once tolerant patchwork of faiths; but after two years of fighting an uprising inspired by Egyptians’ overthrow of military rule, his forces and their foes are both accused of sectarian atrocities.
Disparate rebel groups are fighting alongside radical Sunni Islamists, some linked to Al-Qaeda; but Hezbollah’s despatch of militiamen to help Syrian troops retake a strategic town has electrified broader Sunni opinion against Iran and Shiites this month.
Many saw it as proof of an Iranian drive for regional power.
MAKKAH CONDEMNATION
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech his men would battle on in Syria against what he called a threat from the United States, Israel and “takfiri” — hard-line Sunnis.
In another mark of how high sectarian feeling is running, Friday’s televised sermon for weekly prayers at the Grand Mosque in the holy city of Makkah included an outspoken personal attack on Assad — a tyrant whose troops he said had raped women, killed children and destroyed homes over the past two years.
Sheikh Saoud Al-Shouraym said: “All of that puts on the shoulders of each one of us a share of responsibility before God ... to take a unified and conscious stand.
“Our brothers need more efforts and determination to be exerted to remove the merciless injustice and aggression through all means and with no exceptions,” he told worshippers.