It is increasingly clear that Syria's sectarian war is becoming the regional conflict that analysts have long feared. Recent events - including bombings and assassinations in Damascus and Aleppo, and intensifying violence in northern Lebanon coming directly out of the sectarian hostilities in Syria - suggest that the Assad government now also faces antagonists across its borders.
In Cairo, the Arab League asked the U.N. Security Council on Sunday to send a peacekeeping mission to Syria, and it called on Arab nations to sever diplomatic relations with Damascus to pressure the government to end the violence there.
Like Iraq and Afghanistan before it, analysts say, Syria is likely to become the training ground for a new era of international conflict, and jihadists are already signing up. This weekend, al-Qaeda's ideological leadership and the more mainstream Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood called for jihadists around the world to fight Assad's government.
Nowhere is the cross-border nature of sectarian hostilities more clear than in Iraq's western desert, where Sunni Arabs are beginning to rally to the cause of the Syrian opposition and perhaps strengthen their hand in dealings with an antagonistic Shiite-led national government in Baghdad.
A weapons dealer who operates in Anbar, who said he goes by the alias Ahmed al-Masri, said: "Five months ago I was told that the Syrian brothers are in need of weapons. I started to buy the weapons from the same guys that I previously sold to - the fighters of Anbar and Mosul. I used to bring them from Syria; now it's the other way around."
