In Syria, Converting For Sake of Politics

A secular analyst close to many officials in Syria's authoritarian government marveled at the sect-crossing allegiances brought on by this summer's war. Al-Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood vied with statements of varying degrees of support for the fight by Hezbollah, whose Shiite faith normally would make it a target, not an ally, of Sunni groups.

"The Wahhabis and the Shiites getting together!" exclaimed the analyst, in a Western suit and tie, using a term for Sunni fundamentalists. He spoke on condition he not be identified. "Such a phenomenon. Who would have thought we would see it?"

The flux of relations between Sunnis and Shiites often can have less to do with old enmities and ideology than with where any one group in any one country lines up in relation to the world's growing rifts between East and West.

For Waed Khalil, 21, a student in international law in Damascus who watched on TV this summer as Hezbollah guerrillas held back Israeli ground troops, it was just that simple.

"For the first time in my lifetime, I saw a war that the Arabs were winning," Khalil said.

A Sunni, Khalil began adopting Shiite customs and prayers during the war and is planning on converting fully, he said. His Sunni friends stayed Sunni but taped posters of Nasrallah on their car windshields and bedroom walls.

The focal point of Syria's conversions is the shrine of Sayedah Zeinab, named for the sister of one of the founding figures of the Shiite faith. It was at the Zeinab shrine where Sayed, the lawyer, paid his respects to Nasrallah last Sunday.

Yellow flags with the green Hezbollah emblem dangle in the shrine's courtyard. Inside the shrine, slogans on collection boxes and posters urge Shiite pilgrims from Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, Syria and elsewhere to give generously to the Lebanese people in their fight against Israel.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shiite religious leader, and Moqtada al-Sadr, Iraq's militant Shiite cleric and militia and political leader, all maintain offices around the Damascus shrine.

Syria's ruling Assad family belongs to the Alawite sect, a small offshoot of mainstream Shiism. President Bashar al-Assad, who inherited power from his father, like him enforces secularism in government to help tamp down Syria's Sunni majority.

The government -- a patron of Hezbollah -- since this summer has promoted the cult of Nasrallah as a way of boosting Assad's popularity. Posters and billboards have sprung up around Damascus showing the younger Assad in photo montages alongside the smiling, bearded Hezbollah leader. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also appears in some of the composites.

But some Syrians say the government is uncomfortable with the expansion of the Shiite minority, seeing it as a sign of the growing regional influence of Iran. "The government is so worried -- there's a big wave of Iranians encouraging conversions," a Syrian filmmaker said on condition of anonymity.

Sada denied the impetus for conversions was coming out of Tehran, as a point of Arab pride. "Iran is not the center of the Shiites," the Saudi-born cleric said, stressing that Persian Iran was a relative latecomer to Shiism.

A five-hour drive east of Damascus, the tiny farm town of Hatla has become one of a handful of communities around Syria to convert almost entirely from Sunni to Shiite. Less than 100 miles from the Iraqi province of Anbar, where Sunni guerrillas strive to kill any Shiites who dare pass through, villagers gathered in well-tended gardens and arbors where butterflies fluttered in the afternoon heat to talk proudly of living and working peacefully with their Sunni neighbors.

The path of the converts has not been smooth, Hatla's elders said. It took the advent of satellite TV to educate Syria's Sunnis that their Shiite neighbors were not infidels, the men said. "Four or five years before, we were scared of even mentioning the Shiite faith," said Salim Mohammed, an Arabic teacher.

Then, what satellite dishes advanced, the war in Iraq set back when Syria's Sunnis perceived the Shiite majority in Iraq to be cooperating with American forces.

"We had some kind of movement against the conversions here then; they drowned the conversions,'' said Ali Mousa, a principal in Hatla.

The ascendancy of Nasrallah this summer set things right for Syria's Shiites, Mousa said. Now, he said, Sunnis "see Shiites are not collaborating with the enemy. They see we are the only ones fighting the enemy."

Special correspondent Naseer Mehdawi contributed to this report.