CIAO DATE: 11/2014
December 2013
Foreign Policy Research Institute
In 2006, during the heart of the Global War on Terrorism, a New York Times reporter went to Washington in an attempt to ascertain the extent that American officials understood the ideologies underpinning Islamist terrorism. The reporter began with a simple question: could senior counterterrorism officials identify which groups were Sunnis and which were Shi‘is? Remarkably senior officials and lawmakers – including the Chief of the F.B.I.’s national security branch, and members of the U.S. House of Representatives’ committees on intelligence and counter terrorism – had “no clue” whether actors such as Iran, Hezbollah, or al-Qaida were Sunnis or Shi‘is.[1] A number of questions emerged from this encounter. First, who are the Sunnis and Shi‘is? Second, where are they located? And, finally, does it matter?
Resource link: The Geopolitics of the Sunni-Shi'i Divide in the Middle East [PDF] - 250K