By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Abiding Power of Sectarianism in the Middle East

It has become conventional wisdom that the strikes launched on Iran this year by Israel and the United States, and the shattering of Tehran’s allies and proxy militias in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, have decisively curbed Iran’s influence in the Middle East. But this view misunderstands the nature of Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance”—and Tehran’s potential ability to reconstitute it.

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran capitalized on the turmoil to build a transnational ideological network of Shiite communities, governments, and militias from Iran to Iraq to Lebanon, Yemen, and the Palestinian territories, or what King Abdullah of Jordan fretfully referred to as a “Shiite crescent.” By 2014, analysts regularly observed that Tehran controlled four Arab capitals: Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, and Sanaa.

From a military standpoint, this axis now lies in tatters. Its Iranian architects are aging, and their partners in the Arab world have been decimated by Israeli strikes. A cautious rapprochement over the last two years between Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose rivalry had formerly driven the region’s sectarian conflict, has also contributed to the perception that the sectarian battle in the Middle East is over.

But even if the curtain is falling on the axis of resistance, the Shiite political and religious identity remains intact. Although Iran’s proxy network helped Tehran maintain outsize influence over the Arab world, the axis’s resilience also drew on the enduring power of faith, community, and family ties. What comes next for the region’s Shiites is a question that looms large over the efforts mustered by Gulf Arab countries and the United States to bring stability to the Middle East after the devastating war between Israel and Hamas. These would-be peacemakers must therefore pay much more careful attention to factoring the region’s Shiites, both within and outside Iran, into their vision for regional order.

The current plan to disarm Hezbollah without ending Israel’s occupation of the country’s south—much less providing for the reconstruction of devastated Lebanese Shiite areas, replacing the kinds of services Shiites once received from Hezbollah, or giving Shiites greater say in national politics—effectively disenfranchises Shiites. If Israel follows through on its recent threats to invade Lebanon, that would pose an existential threat to the country’s Shiite community and mobilize it into resistance. And as Sunni rule coalesces in Syria and the U.S. military puts pressure on Shiite militias in Iraq, a sense of a siege on Shiites could assume a regional dimension. If Shiites are marginalized in state-building efforts and diplomacy, they are likely to re-embrace communal politics as a strategy of survival, stoking broader instability. And without a stake in the new order, Iran cannot be successfully contained.

 

Leap of Faith

Although Shiites represent only 15 to 20 percent of Muslims worldwide, they constitute roughly half the Muslim population of the Middle East. Shiite Muslims form the majority of the population in Bahrain, Iran, and Iraq, and nearly the majority in Yemen; they are the largest religious community in Lebanon. Throughout the twentieth century, however, the face of the region was Sunni. Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution raised the specter of Shiite ascendance—and with it, Sunni resistance. Sectarian tensions undergirded the grueling 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, which forged key Shiite transnational ties: Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who would later become the leader of Iraq’s Shiite militias, fled Iraq during that war and fought alongside his Iranian peers against Saddam Hussein.

These transnational Shiite ties expanded dramatically after U.S. forces toppled the Iraqi government in 2003, triggering a revival of religious identity as more Shiites found their way to holy shrines in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, as well as to historic Shiite centers of learning in Najaf, south of Baghdad, and Qom, south of Tehran. Shiite political and military forces also emerged to fill power vacuums in Iraq. In the mid-2000s, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards enlisted the help of Iraqi allies such as Muhandis and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters such as Ali Musa Daqduq and Imad Mughniyeh to organize Iraqi Shiite militants who refused to disarm and join the U.S.-led political transition.

When the Arab Spring broke out in 2011, Iranian and Shiite influence in the Arab world expanded further as civil wars engulfed Syria and Yemen. Those power struggles were inevitably sectarian: Syria’s Alawite rulers only loosely identified with Shiism, yet the threat that Sunni Islamism posed to them turned them into close allies of both Iran and Hezbollah. In 2013, Iran and Hezbollah organized Afghan, Iraqi, and Pakistani Shiite fighters to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s army challenge Sunni Islamists, who were backed by regional Sunni rivals of Iran. The following year, Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards Corps joined Iraqi Shiite militias in launching a full-scale war against the Sunni-led Islamic State (also known as ISIS). The commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qasem Soleimani, led the campaign and became a ubiquitous presence on Iraqi and Syrian battlefields. The Houthis in Yemen, meanwhile—who follow the Zaydi offshoot of Shiism—made common cause with Iran in challenging Yemen’s Sunnis.

Senior Shiite religious authorities, mainstream middle-class Shiites in places such as Baghdad and Beirut, and Shiite elites who feared ISIS’s sectarian bloodlust all supported the war against ISIS, turning it into a broadly Shiite struggle. In June 2014—with ISIS at Baghdad’s doorsteps—Iraq’s most senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who had always opposed Iranian efforts to muster Shiites across the region into military campaigns, even issued a religious edict directing Iraqi youth to join Soleimani’s militias.

Battlefield victories over ISIS helped sustain Shiite rule in Iraq, the Houthis’ fight in Yemen, and the Ba'athist regime in Syria. They also helped link the fight waged against Israel by the Sunni militias Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to the axis of resistance’s general struggle. Buoyed by these successes, Iran used the axis to project power throughout the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, forging a so-called ring of fire around Israel.

 

Compounding Fractures

But the decisive defeat of ISIS in 2019 created the conditions for the axis’s decline. The mobilization of young Shiite Muslims into anti-ISIS militias plummeted. Leading Shiite clerics in the region became more reluctant to conflate religious observance with participation in Iran’s military efforts. From his vantage point in the Iraqi city of Najaf, Sistani openly distanced himself from the axis’s campaigns and condemned militia violence, arguing that Shiites’ enduring power in Iraq rested in their ability to build influence over the state and politics. 

Shiite militias had seized control of a vast amount of Iraqi territory during the anti-ISIS campaign, exceeding the reach of the Iraqi military and police in numerous cities and in certain parts of Baghdad, and gaining considerable economic power independent of the central government. But their credibility as saviors of the Shiites and guarantors of stability in Iraq suffered as they engaged in thuggery and cracked down on anti-corruption protests. In 2020, a U.S. airstrike killed both Soleimani and Muhandis, marking another loss for the axis. In 2021, Iraqi political parties affiliated with Iran and with Iranian-backed militias won only 17 seats in the parliament, down from 48 in 2018.

The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, initially appeared to be a formidable show of force by the axis. But in reality, it exposed and accelerated the axis’s decline. Shiite forces across the region attempted to mobilize in support of Hamas. But in November 2024, Israel decimated Hezbollah by converting the group’s own communications equipment into bombs, killing 42 and maiming thousands of the group’s officials and fighters, and assassinated scores of its commanders and its charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike. A month after that, in Syria, the Assad regime collapsed before an advancing army of Turkish-backed Sunni fighters.

When Israel and the United States unleashed their bruising direct military attack on Iran in June, Tehran’s Shiite proxies did not rise to help defend it. Forced to turn their attention inward, Iran’s leaders did not see a benefit in making transnational appeals and instead called on the Iranian public to defend their homeland. Similarly, Shiite allies in Iraq and Lebanon turned away from rhetoric that rested on a transnational religious identity and more fully embraced their own nationalisms.

Rather than directing their regional allies, Iran now appears to be following those allies’ lead. What was once a hub-and-spoke system of influence has come to look more like a federation of like-minded groups that share objectives but operate autonomously. In Iraq, Iran is encouraging its proxies to trade in their khakis for suits and join the political process. In Lebanon, Hezbollah may accept disarmament under pressure from Israel and the United States to avoid war with Israel and civil war with other Lebanese factions. And changes inside Iran itself—the growing prominence of nationalism and the relaxation of religious strictures, most notably the looser enforcement of hijab—is eroding the country’s claim to transnational spiritual leadership.

The leaders who oversaw the rise of the Shiites are also exiting the stage. Commanders and clerics who participated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution (and have managed to evade assassination) are aging. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is 86. Sistani, who presided over a regional revival of Shiite piety centered in Iraq’s holy cities, is 95 and ailing. Najaf and Qom have long been rival seats of Shiite learning, but during the decades in which Iran focused on building military and political muscle, Najaf, more than Qom (or Tehran), came to represent Shiite religious authority. Sistani’s successor in Iraq, not Khamenei’s successor in Iran, will direct Shiites in matters of faith.

Israel wants to break up Iran’s regional network by actively fomenting further fracturing among Shiites. If weak yet pliant governments that harass or threaten their own minority populations—particularly Shiites—take hold in Lebanon and Syria, the thinking goes, Shiite energy will focus on internal battles for turf and influence rather than on combating Israel. In its occupation of southern Lebanon, meanwhile, Israel is routinely attacking Shiite targets, killing scores of civilians as well as Hezbollah fighters. And its efforts to prevent Damascus from asserting control over Syria are setting the country’s minorities on a collision course with their central government.

 

Hidden Dangers

Yet the decline of Shiite military power throughout the Middle East does not mean that Shiites’ religious identity and sense of being part of a transnational faith community have weakened. The number of Shiites making pilgrimages to Iraq’s holy cities is steadily growing year on year despite political and military losses. In August, the commemoration of the martyrdom of the third Shiite imam drew an estimated 21 million worshipers to the Iraqi city of Karbala.

As Iran falters and pressure builds on Shiite militias to disarm, Shiites fear a future of marginalization and violence. Syria, which had been the linchpin of the axis, is now ruled by veterans of ISIS and other militant Sunni groups that fought against Hezbollah during Syria’s civil war. The new regime in Damascus is backed by the region’s principal Sunni powers, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and is looking to forge a deal with Israel. Meanwhile, Shiites in Lebanon and Iraq worry that Damascus could support Sunnis in their countries, changing the balance of power to their disadvantage.

Threatened and feeling besieged, Shiites may turn even more decisively toward a communal identity. Syria’s Druze and Alawite minorities have already begun to resist Damascus’s authority. To prevent new civil wars, government collapse, and a resurgence of extremism—in short, the very circumstances that allowed Iran to build the axis of resistance in the first place—state-building efforts in Lebanon and Syria should focus on guaranteeing equal rights for all communities. If Beirut and Damascus exclude minorities, marginalized Shiites will again turn to Iran for support; once conflict erupts, Iranian help with training, arms, and financing will follow.

In Iraq, where the delicate process of forming a government and intra-Shiite negotiation continues, moderate Shiite leadership must be encouraged. This requires constitutional reforms to dismantle the clientelist networks of militants turned politicians (a system that still grants them seats in parliaments and provincial councils). Recent U.S. policy has put heavy pressure on Iraq’s government to distance itself from Iran. Washington must avoid forcing Baghdad to make such a stark choice: doing so could undermine the standing of moderate Shiite leaders and undo their attempts to blunt the disruptive influence of militants-turned-politicians and insulate Iraq from the conflict between Iran and Israel.

Across the region, avoiding a return to violence depends on ensuring that Shiites see a political future in their respective countries—a national role that would replace adherence to a transnational ideology—as well as economic opportunities outside the largess of militias. In Lebanon, for instance, simply disarming and dismantling Hezbollah will not bring stability. For decades, the organization acted as a state for the Shiite community, providing security, jobs, and social services; now that the group’s role is diminished, Shiites must be offered other means of participating in the country’s politics and economy

The Lebanese, Syrian, and Iraqi governments—with the help of the United States and Arab neighbors—must provide Shiites with middle-class jobs in the private sector to reduce their dependence on employment in the public sector, which militants control. There are Shiite middle classes in Lebanon and Iraq that are poised to take advantage of the economic opportunities that the United States and its Gulf allies envision for the region after Israel’s military operations end. Without a means of economic participation, young people could be drawn back into militancy.

As Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states make investments to encourage the rise of strong, centralized governments in Lebanon and Syria that can resist Iranian influence, they must not let those efforts interfere with the process of normalization with Iran. Normalization has helped keep the Gulf stable as the rest of the Middle East erupted into war, and to ensure that this stability persists, Arab states must more actively pair state-building plans with an economic vision that also offers a future to Shiite areas in Lebanon and Iraq. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates must ensure that their current cease-fires with the Houthis hold and that diplomatic progress continues toward ending Yemen’s civil war for good. To prevent Iran’s resurgence as a regional spoiler, they must drop the mindset that Shiites throughout the region are vassals of Iran and treat them as equal citizens.

 

Reconstruction Needs Reconciliation

If the United States, for its part, wants to end conflict in the Middle East, see Iraq prosper independent of Iranian control, it also has to integrate Shiite groups into the national and regional orders it envisions. In Lebanon, that means coupling the effort to disarm Hezbollah with a clear plan for reconstructing Shiite areas and enfranchising Shiites politically. The United States must do all it can to safeguard the cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel, too: Lebanese Shiites will certainly resist an Israeli invasion and occupation, just as they did between 1982 and 2000. Renewed resistance would breathe new life into what remains of the axis.

Washington must buttress the efforts by Arab states to normalize ties with Iran, which means talking to Tehran directly. Contrary to what U.S. President Donald Trump seems to assume, Iran does not feel defeated after the 12-day war in June. Tehran believes that the missiles it launched at Israel inflicted enough damage to give both Israel and the United States pause before contemplating another round of fighting. And by now, it is also clear that the strikes did not fully obliterate Iran’s nuclear capabilities and ambitions.

Regional stability depends on Iran’s engaging diplomatically and economically with the Arab world, but Arab states are wary of granting a larger regional role to a Tehran that may go nuclear. Any restoration of diplomatic relations with Bahrain or expansion of economic ties with other Gulf states is contingent on Iran’s progress in nuclear talks. Sooner rather than later, Washington will therefore have to refocus its attention on negotiating a nuclear deal with Tehran.

Keeping the Levant fractured will not bring stability to the Middle East. The Shiite communities that once undergirded the axis of resistance must be incorporated into the region’s political and social life. And Iran must see that it can reap more benefit from diplomatic and economic engagement than from resuming its disruptive military efforts. Shiite groups have been weakened, but trying to keep them subdued by excluding them from politics will only make them prey for future Iranian efforts to rebuild its proxy network—and imperil any broader vision of regional peace.

 

 

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