 Good morning, everyone. I'm Fred Wary. I'm a senior fellow here at the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It's my pleasure to welcome you to this session on sectarianism and conflict in the Middle East. This event, of course, comes in the midst of an especially unsettled time in the region where geopolitical rivalries have conspired with princely ambition and sectarianism to really shake up the region. And we're certainly going to have some rich discussions on these current developments in Saudi Arabia, in Lebanon, in Iran by some leading experts. But the point of this session is to really step back and look at some broader dynamics in the region, specifically the role of sectarian identity in fueling instability and conflict in the Middle East. Specifically, we're here to share some important contributions by the authors of a new edited volume beyond Sunni and Shia. And here I'll make a shameless plug. The book is on sale outside for, I believe, a 50% discount. It will be available online in early 2018. Now, the chapters that you'll encounter in that book and the presentations that you're going to hear today are really the fruits of an intense two-year research effort that was generously funded by the Henry Loose Foundation. Now, as some of you may know, the Loose Foundation has a mandate. Its sort of focus is to increase an understanding of religion in international affairs. And so this question of sectarian identity is a highly pertinent one. It's also a highly challenging question, fraught with pitfalls. And it's one, quite frankly, that's been studied quite a bit. And here my feeling is the more the merrier. There's been a number of studies that have come out that I think are really pushing the boundaries about how we think about questions of religious identity in the Middle East to include challenging a lot of the received wisdom. And the book spells out a lot of those theories and the methodology and the debates that we engage with. But let me just say a brief word here about how we defined what we were actually looking at in this book. I think all of our authors adopted a definition of sectarianism as a set of beliefs, attitudes, and actions that exclude or demonize a religious other. So this spans the spectrum from soft discrimination all the way to some of the horrific massacres we see being committed by the Islamic State. Now, in framing sectarianism, I think we saw a great value in a comparative approach. And indeed, one of our authors is actually a scholar of conflict resolution in Northern Ireland. And though the book, as the title suggests, focuses on the Sunni-Shia split, we, of course, acknowledge a number of other intra-Islamic divisions, specifically within Sunni Islam, as well as differences between Muslims and other religious faiths in the region. I think when we started our study back in 2015, all of our scholars acknowledged the limitations of looking at the region through a religious lens. In particular, I think we rejected what can be called the sort of primordialist school of thought. And this is sort of a deterministic view that sees the Middle East, the tensions in the Middle East today as a continuation of an age-old conflict in Islam, within Islam, within the Sunni-Shia branches of Islam. This notion that the conflict is preordained, it's immutable, the sort of ancient hatreds school of thought. Now, to be sure, there are important divides between the two sects over questions of religious and political authority, rituals, jurisprudence, and other matters. But this notion of these two blocks that are locked in conflict in the Middle East I think is patently false. And it's a notion that's been rejected by most serious scholars today. But unfortunately, I think it still exists as an explanation, as a sort of lazy explanation in the media and unfortunately in policy circles as well. And I think at the other end of the spectrum is this notion of religion, an interpretation of religion using an excessively materialist or instrumentalist approach. This notion that sectarianism is top down, that it's really a reflection of economic and political grievances or elite manipulation. Of course, we acknowledge that this is in play. And I think a lot of scholars tilt toward this school of thought. This notion that sectarianism in the Middle East is a product of authoritarianism, the lack of pluralistic governance that elites in the region have an interest in playing divide and rule of organizing their politics along sectarian lines to prevent challenges to their rule. And certainly, this plays a role. We see this, of course, in the pronouncements of clerics. We see it in the foreign policies of a number of states. But I think these explanations have their limitations as well. Belief, identity, principles, doctrines do, in fact, matter to quite a number of people in the region. So we try to steer a sort of middle path between these two polls. And I think this middle path is really reflected in the backgrounds of the scholars that contributed. We have political scientists. We have sociologists, journalists, even a criminologist who looked at sectarianism in policing sectors. We have scholars who use incredible data-driven coding and surveys. And we have sort of classically trained historians of Islam and scholars of theology who focus on the primary texts. The topics, as you'll see from the panel and also the chapters, are country-based and geographic. But they're also thematic. And that's the way we've divided the two panels today. The first panel, which I'll moderate, will cover how sectarianism factors into the foreign policies and internal politics of a number of pivotal states in the region. Two include Saudi Arabia, its relationship with Iran and the Islamic State, the role of sectarianism in Iranian foreign policy, the sectarianization of Syria's civil war, and of course, sectarianism in contemporary Iraq, which is an especially important issue given the common notion that the 2003 invasion of that country by the US sort of triggered this sectarian explosion in the region. So having surveyed the region, the second panel will drill down into some thematic and structural topics. How do institutions in the region affect sectarianism? How does governance and even technology affect the diffusion and transformation of sectarianism? And here, we'll hear from some highly original research by Justin Gangler on political economy. Alex Siegel on the role of social media. Joe Bahoot will look at sect-based power sharing in Lebanon, the Taf agreement. How well has that held up, given recent developments? And of course, Alex Henley will examine the role of clerics in both fueling and tempering sectarianism. I'll add that this, the speaker lineup does not reflect the complete author list. We've also got some great chapters on Egypt, on the Islamic State, on Bahrain, and then a comparative chapter looking at Northern Ireland. So with that, I won't waste any more time. We'll get started right on the first panel. And I'd like to start off with a country that's on everyone's minds, that has such an important influence in the region, and that is often sort of blamed for stoking sectarianism, especially in the Arab world, Iran. Well, thank you, thank you for having me. So my chapter is on the sectarian dilemma in Iranian foreign policy. Broadly, I frame this as, is Iran a sectarian actor? If so, how, who sees it as such? And really, who sees Iran as a sectarian actor is its neighbors. Its neighbors see it as a far more problematic actor. So is Iran sectarian foreign policy, or is Iran foreign policy sectarian sort of in general? I would say broadly, no, it's not. And you can look at a number of reasons why this is. Iran's relationship with India, Iran's relationship with China, Iran's relationship with Venezuela, with Armenia. There's lots of examples of how Iran is not a sectarian actor, not in the Pan-Islamic sense, and not in the Pro-Shia sense, which is sort of the more narrow angle that my chapter looks at. So if it's not sort of a broadly afforn policy sort of consideration for Iran to be sectarian driven, then where does it lie? Where is this sectarian element coming from? And it comes largely from Iran's behavior in the region. But what I would say, what Iran's behavior in the region and its broader aims in terms of foreign policy share is an element of self-interest, that Iran's foreign policy is driven by self-interest, it's driven by geopolitical challenges, it's driven by strategic interests, and these are really sort of the true norths, I think, for Iran's foreign policy, broadly speaking. But obviously there's a problem, and that problem resides on the perception of Iran's foreign policy and its behavior more particularly in the region. And I think Iran's behavior in the region is a little more identifiable as such as sectarian. You can easily sort of look at the landscape of who Iran's friends are, which countries it's involved in, and who it does its business with in the Middle East to realize that there's a sectarian sort of divide in terms of who its friends tend to be and who its friends tend not to be. And I'll get sort of a little more into that briefly. I'm gonna keep this short just in general. Hopefully we can have a lot of discussion from the audience. I think there's a lot going on in this sort of generally speaking, regarding sort of Iran and the Middle East. I should say sort of outright that the way that I frame this chapter is within Iran's conflict with its neighbors. Sometimes sort of boil down to the Iran-Saudi conflict or the Iran-Saudi tensions. I see them as a little more broadly than just Iran-Saudi. That's really sort of what I root this paper in. So what is the basis of Iranian sort of sectarianism or the perception of Iranian sectarianism? I think there's structural and contextual reasons for this. First and foremost, you have 500 years of history where Iran has been a primarily Shia state surrounded by primarily Sunni neighbors. This is a dynamic that has existed, like I said, for half a millennia. And it's hardened the identities of all of those countries that perceive Iran in one way and Iran perceives its neighbors this other way. This is not sort of a primordial argument. This is just a state of fact that Iran has been seen as a Shia country. That's to say it sees itself as a primarily Shia country and its neighbors are different for the most part. The second is a regional geopolitical angle. And this really starts with the 1979 revolution. The Islamic revolution obviously brings, whether you're familiar with Iran or not, brings to power in Iran a theocracy that's governed by Shia clergy. They're driven by an ideology that is framed within a pan-Islamist agenda but is articulated through a very undeniably sort of Shia language. And this is something that challenged its neighbors right after 1979. And the rest of Iranian sort of political changes after 1979 also challenged its neighbors. It was anti-monarchical. If you go right across the Gulf, you have monarchies that still exist to this day. That was an inherent challenge. It was revolutionary. Revolutions are inherently challenging to the status quo. So for all of these reasons, Iran was seen as a challenge after 1979 but the theocracy of Iran made this challenge not just political or ideological but also gave a religious tinge to all of Iran's behavior. After 1979, because of this and because of some actions that Iran and its neighbors made, Iran became quite isolated. You have the Iran-Iraq war which starts less than two years after the 1979 revolution. It lasts for eight years after that. And during that war, fear of Iran's religious ideology spreading beyond Iran's borders into Iraq, changing the nature of Iraq, galvanized the neighborhood, as I call the Middle East, against Iran. So people bankrolled Saddam Hussein's fight against Iran. They also supported them politically. And throughout the 1980s, Iran frankly had no friends. Syria was a mild friend. Libya, Moammar, Qaddafi was a mild friend. It was able to buy weapons from places like North Korea but it really had no allies. And so after the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq war into the 90s, Iran is a pretty isolated country that realizes it has no real friends. It has no friends in the region and because of its sort of ideological and political goals, it's difficult for it to make friends very easily or at least close friends. So what Iran started to begin to concentrate on was the development of friends that were sort of below the state level. It had difficulty sort of creating friends at the state level. So below the state, they could find constituencies that were either alienated or within conflict zones or that wanted assistance from a foreign power but weren't getting any of that assistance. And Iran played that role. They had already during the 1980s developed in foreign clients like Lebanese Hezbollah or Iraqi groups like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Skiri or the Bader organization. Those groups became meaningful later on but they were a way of Iran finding constituencies, finding groups that would sort of be on board with Iran's agenda but also willing to do business with Iran. So suffice it to say that the majority of these friends that Iran was able to make through the 1990s and even into the 2000s, particularly after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, tended to be Shiites. They reached out to Sunnis as well and some Sunni groups they were able to become friends with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are two good examples of Palestinian groups. Iran also tried hard in the mid 90s to make friends with Bosnian groups but those Bosnian groups ended up becoming better friends with countries that had more money and less strings attached than Iran. So enter the Arab Spring 2011. Most of Iran's friends, most of its allies in the region are not states but rather below the state level. Iraq is now an exception after Saddam Hussein. It is a friendly country and it was able to become a friend of Iran through sort of a twofold foreign policy approach. One was sort of what you would call a legitimate or a traditional foreign policy approach which is state to state, investment, commercial activities, diplomacy, that sort of thing but also there was a below the state activity and this was the funding of militant groups that targeted US forces and helped drive US forces out in 2011. It then became part of the political conversation after 2011. So Iran enter the Arab Spring now has a new region to deal with, right? And that new region now has these conflicts or uprisings that exist in places like Bahrain or Syria or Yemen that all have a sectarian tinge to them. They are disgruntled or discontent communities that are rising against or protesting their ruling regimes and they just happen to have a sectarian divide between those two sides. So Iran's interest in those areas, Syria in particular but Bahrain and Yemen as well, made it a natural ally for those people that were rebelling against the status quo or in two of those countries were rebelling against the status quo and then in Syria it was against the rebels against the status quo. So Iran becomes involved in all of those conflicts either sort of primarily rhetorically in the case of Bahrain or literally in terms of military efforts and support in the cases of Syria and in Bahrain. And then when you have the rise of ISIS, obviously things change and Iran becomes much more involved in Iraq and an overt side as well. So after the Arab Spring, you really have sectarianism grow as an issue not just because of what Iran's doing but just regionally it's become much more of an issue and Iran's activities become very difficult to contain in terms of their sectarian dynamic. So for instance, if you look at all Iran's allies and all of the conflicts going on in Yemen, Iraq and in Syria, for the most part they are entirely Shi'i. If you look at the way that they articulate their adversaries or their enemies either sort of broadly or directly, they are all for the most part Sunnis, Saudi Arabia, UAE, the Syrian rebels, ISIS of course, but that's an easy one and not a hard sell for Iran. But it changes things, right? It also changes from Iran's perspective the nature of the conflict, right? The Arab Spring and particularly the rise of ISIS changed sort of what Iran was doing in a sense of making it maybe somewhat illegitimate in the eyes of its own people but also in terms of how is seen internationally to something that was seen as a little more legitimate at least in Syria and in Iraq, right? They're fighting ISIS and ISIS being a hyper anti-Shi'a organization that was killing Shi'a by the thousands. Suddenly there was a reason for Iran's involvement to be pro-Shi'a to help sort of define a Shi'a resistance against these groups. So more broadly speaking, the difficulty for Iran's support to these groups is not just that it supports them politically but it's also the language that they use to describe these events. So at the top level of Iranian government, all of the official statements are non-sectarian and they're very consistent about this point and they have been for the most part since 1979. Iranian India or the Homanist ideology in the Islamic Republic is Pan-Islamic. They want Sunni friends just as much as they want Shi'a friends and in fact they always hold up their Sunni friends like Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad as examples of how they are not sectarian, right? This is sort of I can't be sectarian because I have minority friends too. We have American equivalents of the same thing and so in some ways it's just as shallow a sort of retort from a regional perspective as it seems but for Iran it's a very sincere thing. They believe in spreading that sort of support across sectarian sides but the problem is is that the main element that does this activity outside of Iran, the IRGC, Iran's primary military organization, the way they describe these conflicts is completely sectarian. Not to the sense that it's anti-Sunni but to the sense that it's completely intertwined with Shi'a identity and about Shi'a identity and about protecting Shi'a identity and not only that, it's not only communal, it's also religious. They describe their efforts in Syria or their efforts in Saudi Arabia as defending the Shi'a shrines in those countries and those shrines were a metaphor for defending the Shi'a religion. They talk about their network of allies of these militant groups primarily from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and even into Yemen as a transnational Shi'a army where they have made that point. They've walked that point back and now it's just called a transnational Muslim army but the point is there, they wear it on their sleeve and this is not in any way lost by Iran's neighbors. So Iran in some sense kind of wants to play the part of the pan-Islamist sort of actor in the region but really when it comes down to their actual behavior whether it's structural or whatever the roots are it comes off as very one-sided. Now the other side of this is that post-2011, you can even say before 2011, Iran's neighbors are engaging in the exact same thing in a different way but in the exact same thing. All of their allies are Sunnis. You don't see Saudi Arabia or the Emirates or Jordan or even Turkey reach out or try to build Shi'a constituencies or support Shi'a consistencies. So in a sense Iran has no competition within the Shi'a realm at least at the grassroots level at the top political level. There's sort of some differences. So the way that I see it is to conclude this that Iran's foreign policy at its roots is not sectarian. Iran's goals, what they're trying to achieve, you can say at best is pan-Islamic if not is just completely driven by self-interest but their behavior in the Middle East is inherently sectarian and perhaps increasingly so. And so the way that I see it is the more sectarian that politics has become especially conflicts in the Middle East have become the more sectarian Iran's behavior has become and this is sort of a chicken and egg sort of concept but I really think that the two are connected. So were sectarianism to decrease I would expect Iranian sectarian to also decrease but that is sort of a long way down the road. I think I'll sort of leave it there. Moving across the gulf. Okay, so what I've been asked to talk about is primarily ISIS in Saudi Arabia and ISIS in Saudi Arabia and perhaps even Saudi foreign policy. I should just caveat that by saying I'm a historian who looks primarily at history of Saudi Arabia, history of religion in Saudi Arabia and I also follow the jihadi movements in the modern Middle East very carefully. So that's the lens that I'm coming from to this. And what's interesting to me though in looking at this subject right now is that it's a reflection of just how fast things are moving in Saudi Arabia these days that it was a year and a half ago everybody was talking about ISIS in Saudi Arabia not the detention of princes and ministers and the Ritz Carlton. So we've really seen a great development in the news cycle and then what is a perceived threat or story in this country. So a bottom line up front will be that the Islamic State does not represent a kind of imminent existential threat to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia but it will probably be a persistent one for a few reasons. So let me run through what has happened with regard to ISIS and the Islamic State. As you all know in mid 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the caliphate and soon after that he announced the extension or the expansion of the caliphate to a number of other quote unquote provinces. One of those provinces so designated was the Arabian Peninsula. They never call it Saudi Arabia because the word Saudi is the name comes from the name of the Saudi royal family so they would never refer to them as Saudis. They call them the El Salud which instead of the El Saud is being a reference to an early opponent of the Prophet. It's kind of an inside baseball there but there you have it. So in November 2014, when Bakr al-Baghdadi announced the establishment of an official presence in Saudi Arabia, he outlined a strategy there for pursuing the organization's objectives and strategy was as follow. First attack the Shia, which was interesting because that meant he wanted to focus the efforts of the Islamic State on stoking a kind of sectarian civil war in Saudi Arabia, Allah, the Iraq War after 2003. So after going after the Shia, he said then go after the Saudi security forces and then third go after Westerners and Western interests which is a script that the Islamic State would indeed follow in Saudi Arabia over the next couple of years and even until the present. It really hasn't attacked Westerners except in maybe one exceptional case which is interesting because it's exactly the opposite approach that was taken by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula back when it was staging a small insurgency in Saudi Arabia back in 2003. Their focus was to go after Westerners and then go after security forces and if you have time go after the Shia. But so you have a completely different strategy which is totally sectarian. And over the course of a couple of years the Islamic State announced that it had three provinces in Saudi Arabia. Of course they didn't run any, hold any territory in these provinces but they had the province they said of Bahrain. Bahrain is an old Arabic term meaning Eastern Arabia and they had the province of Najd which is central Arabia where the capital Riyadh is and they had the Western province or the province of the Hijaz. And so when they issued, when they had attacks they were proclaimed in the name of these different provinces. And for a while there seemed to be actually a lot of momentum on the side of these attacks. There were mostly suicide bombings and shootings at Shia shrines and mosques in the Eastern province at mosques that were dedicated for the Saudi security forces. And they killed a lot of people. Their greatest attack was actually in Kuwait city. Had about 200 casualties, this is about two years ago. But things did not continue in this vein. But at the height, just to go back, in May 2016 the Saudi press reported that the country was seeing one ISIS attack every 12 days which was quite a lot. But things changed rather quickly. So it seems to be that they basically arrested a lot of the people they were able to penetrate a lot of the cells and as soon as they did that and as soon as ISIS in Iraq and Syria started not to maybe be as attractive, not as inspiring, the number of attacks went down very significantly. And so really all you read about today when you read about ISIS in Saudi Arabia is how the security forces have staged a raid on an ISIS holdout or stronghold and they've killed those people. And just two weeks ago there was one of these outside Riyadh where a guy who was being arrested detonated his suicide belt. But in any event, the government is certainly by no means worried about the threat of the Islamic State to its hold on power. So the other dimension though that in which the Islamic State is kind of attacking Saudi Arabia is conceptual. So the Jihadi movement, the Jihadi-Salefi movement to which both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State belong is a blend of different Islamic influences. But the one that is dominant in the Islamic State is actually Wahhabism, a kind of modern reading, politicized reading of Wahhabism, Wahhabism being the revivalist and intolerant puritanical revivalist movement that begins in Saudi Arabia in the mid 18th century. So they see themselves, ISIS the way that they portray themselves because they are an extension of this mission on behalf of monotheism and this war against the forces of what they call polytheism and unbelief and that a mission that was started by Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab in the mid 1740s. And they deploy this narrative in particular in the context of Saudi Arabia because they're trying to challenge the modern Saudi state for the right to say that we are the heirs of this tradition. So when you read their propaganda or you listen to the speeches of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, there are lots of small references where they say, oh you in Saudi Arabia, oh you people of Tauheed, oh you people of Al-Wala Al-Bara, these are references to Wahhabi theological principles and they're trying to shame good Wahhabi Muslims in Saudi Arabia into thinking that they're not supporting monotheism the way that they ought to. And what's interesting about this is that it comes at a time when the Saudi state under Crown Prince Muhammad ibn Salman is really trying to distance himself from what he calls the opposite of moderate Islam. So you have a situation where a jihadi movement is increasingly adopting the religious heritage of Wahhabism while the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is kind of trying to get rid of or at least suppress the more militant and intolerant portions of Wahhabism in its country. So you'll see this contest for power and it features a lot in the propaganda. Just to say a kind of vignette about this. So the former Mufti of the Islamic State was a man named Turki al-Binali. He had studied actually in Saudi Arabia in the mid 2000s under one of the leading scholarly authorities for Wahhabism in the Kingdom, a guy named Abdullah ibn Jibrin. And when Abdullah ibn Jibrin died in 2009, he received a phone call from the then governor of Riyadh who is now King Salman. King Salman called him, or not called him, he called his family, excuse me. And this is a custom, but the thing is, this was a particularly harsh cleric, if you think ibn Bez was tough. This man believed that all the Shi'a needed to be killed, as he said, that there was no excuse for being Shi'a. And Turki is probably a more intense anti-Shi'a kind of statement than Turki al-Binali himself held. So just a couple of days later, after you had that statement from the king, the man who would become the Mufti of ISIS also gave a eulogy for the same scholar. I don't think going into the future that we're going to see that kind of situation where the Mufti of ISIS and the King of Saudi Arabia are paying homage to the same Salafi scholar. We're moving in a different direction and it'll be interesting to see. I think that a lot of the Saudi response so far in the media has been to describe all of its enemies as kind of associated with Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood. In the case of ISIS, I don't think either of those claims is true. There hasn't really been a kind of reassessment of the role that Wahhabism plays in stimulating these ideologies. I'm not sure that there actually will be. I think it will be done more quietly though. That is the kind of getting past Wahhabism. Yes, so am I wired, am I audible? Yes, you are. So Fred, you have thankfully taken away a bit from what I wanted to say. I didn't mean to. By referring to the pre-modulist and instrumentalist approach to sectarianism and we look at Syria, the Syrian case that is reflected I would say in two narratives concerning the conflict. We have the narrative what you describe as lazy scholarship or lazy politics or journalism which basically holds that this is again one conflict between two irreconcilable religious communities who are in this discourse really treated as nations. Nations in Anderson's sense, they're like political collectives and they're struggling for the state so they're maybe struggling for new states and you have a series of scholars like Joshua Landers for instance who actually go and say, well let's redraw the map and make a state for the Sunnis and Shia. I'm exaggerating a bit what he was saying but only a bit. And of course as a social scientist this is not where we want to be. Particularly since it omits the role of state power. It omits the role of authoritarianism as you said in creating these identities and exploiting them. And as of course it's a narrative that is very hostile to difference. So there can only be one people and so hence there can only be one belief in the community according to this narrative. So we would gravitate towards the other narratives and that in the Syrian context holds there's an evil dictator who's using sectarianism as a strategy of divided rule. Basically lacking legitimacy faced with opposition, this evil dictator and his evil crew strategically manipulate sectarianism to bring the people to their sides and to create another that then can be fought and destroyed as terrorists, Islamists, what have you. Now I also, unfortunately, I'm a bit uncomfortable with that narrative too. And the idea that you have these brave young activists who I have a lot of sympathy with who basically create this counter narrative, this counter vision if you want of Syrian society as one that is civic that goes beyond nice people beyond those divisive identities into one collective on the liberal base of individual citizenship. And the idea that these people only got marginalized as a result of violence. Once violence starts, of course, you have to bring out the thugs on both sides. You need to, the people who know how to use guns and who know how to hit in the streets and those are not going to be the nice liberal people who propose the other idea. And of course there's a narrative of foreign influence that pushed it into this direction from both ends, from Iran and from Saudi Arabia depending from which political angle you look at at the scenery. What makes me a bit uncomfortable with this narrative is two things. One is the observation that the Syrian regime before 2011 certainly functioned by the principle of the Biden rule. But the ways it divided society in order to rule used many different devices, used many different strategies and many different identities also. And sectarianism or sectarian identity was only one of them. And for instance, local identities, class solidarity, class interest, simply material interest, all of these were equally used and played against each other and played to create a polity that could be ruled by this dictator at the top who were all power would coalesce. And the second observation that makes me uncomfortable with this narrative is that you look at the very early stage of the uprising, so March 2011, April 2011. We know what happened. You realize that sectarian incidences, if you want to call them that, violence that is clearly meant to either look sectarian, create impression that it's motivated by sectarianism or is motivated by sectarianism. You have that at a very early stage, at a stage well before foreign influence really became overwhelming. And I would posit here that I'm getting even more uncomfortable closer to the primordialists. I would posit that Syrian society in 2011 or before 2011 was primed for sectarianism, was primed for such a reaction and that it would have required very conscious, responsible political leadership to avoid it. To avoid that outcome. And that in the absence of such leadership and of course, when we talk about the regime in that with a tendency to actually condone this kind of development, this development was unavoidable. It was unavoidable despite the best of the efforts of those great activists. So why is that so? I mean, why was Syria in 2011 primed for sectarianism? Not, of course, I hope I don't need to say that again, but I still do because of this age old never-to-be-bridge, never-to-be-reconciled conflict between the two, two or several religious groups. If we really consider the Alawis to be Shia, which can be debated. Not because of this, but because of a history, the very recent history of perhaps two decades before the uprising. Two, three decades before the uprising. Now point out three elements here, or three factors, let's say that are generative, I think, of sectarianization, of making sect or sectarian identification a very crucial way for Syrians to interpret and to organize their society around them, with social processes around them, things that they happen to them or their relatives, things that structure their life. One, the first aspect is a legacy of violence. So we had, and this is unfortunately under-reported in the discussions about the conflict, we had a conflict along similar lines roughly 20 years before, 20 years, no, 30 years before. 30 years before, starting in the late 1970s. There was, in Syria, which was autocratic, of course, at the time, serious opposition against the regime of the father, Hafiz al-Assad. And that opposition was not only Islamist, it was leftist, it was nationalist. There were many objections to various aspects of the Barthi regime at the time, but eventually the strongest actor in that opposition, in that opposition movement, turned out to be the Muslim Brotherhood, if you want, but really precisely one faction of the Muslim Brotherhood, who drew that conflict into violence. Now, they didn't have to draw very much, the regime was very prepared to use violence, but violence also came from that end. And there's the famous or infamous event at Aleppo Artillery School in 1979, where a commando of this faction, the fighting of vanguards, penetrated the school and massacred all the al-Awi officers and that also needs to go. And then you have a whole, of course, a whole, the whole story of escalating violence of people being kidnapped, being killed for no reason, no reason other than being al-Awi, and so on and so forth, and counter violence. And this legacy of violence lingered, of course, lingered on when the conflict was over. And whoever lived in Syria in the 1990s will know that, I mean, you talked to people back then, and this was very, very present. And if you talk, for instance, to people, part of the minorities and Christians, the common cause was there will be a day of reckoning, and after they killed all the al-Awis, they come and kill us. I heard that so many times in the early 90s in Syria. So that was very present as like something looming in the not so distant past, and very easily to be summoned. The second is the nexus in Syria, in particular between sectarianization and secularization. Sorry, I'm trouble pronouncing this. So after the conflict of the early 80s and late 70s, as you know, the security service, intelligence service called the Muki-1, organized mafias, had an extremely powerful role in Syrian society. So wherever you were and whatever you would do, you would have to pay bribes to them. I mean, it's really, I think a comparison with the mafia is not entirely out of place here. Khua, it is in Arabic. And the experience, let's say, of everyday experience of the ordinary Syrian would be that there's always some security officer somewhere whose intervention, support, what have you, is in the end of almost anything decisive. To the point where even activities that were like by dissidents, an example in the chapter, would be read that way. So oh, he can do that because he's alawi, hence he's well-connected with security. Without really necessarily any factual base. It's like a default assumption that this is the case. So again, the experience that access to state power, access to life chances, access to wealth, is determined by these links, where sectarian belonging, no, sectarian membership, a sect on your ID card, whatever, is an important point. But the most important point of course is not sect but family, family relations or local relations of people coming from the same local community. Now, you know Syria, you know that all the discourse about the multi-sectarian society and everything apart, there's not much mixing, right? Mixing and so far as you have areas that are not associated with a certain sectarian group is restricted to the big cities. And even the big cities to a few central quarters. So in Ladi-e-e, in Homs, in places like this, basically almost every quarter except the central one has a sectarian identity. And that of course, even more so applies to villages. So if you use your relatives, if you use people from your area to achieve something, you are implicitly also using a sectarian channel and not only a local one. The third point, and again, this is feeds into the, if you want the cognitive mechanisms of interpreting social relations, being or taking sectarian belonging or identity into a consideration, giving it a very important place. And the third aspect is, and now we jump back from history into to 2011, are what you may want to call the repertoire of protest, the way to protest and the places where you can protest. Well, the places where you can protest. In Syria, there was no public space in the sense of a space that was accessible to everybody and freely accessible before 2011. You want to do anything anywhere, you always need either relation to somebody or connection to somebody. And the few spaces that were neutral from a sectarian point of view that I referred to this sent certain parts of the big cities were under very tight security control and the protest has never got hold of them, except for very, very short instances. The central square in Homs, the Saht-e-Sah for one night, while violently dispersed other than the same night. Hama for, I think, two or three days, wasn't it long, I don't remember. Again, violently dispersed and Hama had its special problematique. And on the contrary, the central spaces were in fact claimed by the regime for counter manifestations of loyalty. Protest happened or were quickly restricted to places again with a clear sectarian identity in places like Homs, for instance, in places like the EU and hence associated with the sectarian marker of that area. That's about the place. The repertoire. There was not really a protest repertoire in Syria to a large extent that was devoid of religious symbolism. I would argue for the reason, for the simple reason that religious sensitivity is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful frame of reference in Syrian society. I realized that sounds orientalistic as a claim, but I think it can be backed up if you look at it. And other, if you want, frame, frames, if you use social movement, framing devices in the end did not measure up to the impact that these religious frames had. So you could go out and make this argument and make this claim, this is about uniting Syrians across all scenes, creating a unifying national identity, but even that kind of discourse would always be validated by opposing the other discourse of religious division. And it did not measure up to the impact of, let's say, funerals. You wanna tell me to shut up, right? I'm getting ready. I'm getting ready to shut up. Funerals, like chanting religious slogans, like at some point in social media, you could observe that actually the intensity of takbir, shouting ala wakda from the internet, became on social media like a yardstick for revolutionary activism, you know, people do that. And again, if you make these religious, if you use these religious repertoire, then eventually even those from other groups who would participate would get second thoughts about what is this about, you know, is this how we included in this discourse of unity. So just to finish this, to jump forward from 2011 to 2017 to what is now being tried in terms of de-escalation, in terms of reconciliation deals, all these nice labels for the eventual capitulation to the regime. I mentioned at the beginning the different techniques of divide and rule that the regime has been using forever. And the use of local identities and the localization of power through systems of patronage where basically you have the center of power and then the practice of power is franchised out to the bottom, to people in villages, to people in regions who represent the state and reproduce the same relationship on that level, be them alawies, be them Sunnis, be them Druze, be them whatever, whoever is relevant in that region would be co-opted by the regime into its power structure. And what is currently happening, I think, is a recreation, a reconfiguration of that pre-2011 system of localized building of power that includes all communities provided you refer to the center, you refer to the evil dictator, you can be alawie, you can be Sunni, you can be Druze, it doesn't matter, as long as you are loyal. And that's the currency, I think, in the end in Syria today. It's loyalty to the center, it's loyalty to the dictator, not sect, and I'll stop here. Very good, great. Last but not least. Thank you, Fred. Good morning, everyone. I suppose I should start by congratulating you, Fred, on the publication of the volume and it really is an excellent volume, I think. The literature on the subject on sectarian identity, sectarian relations has grown exponentially in the last 15 years and I think this volume is part of a fairly recent trend of that literature getting increasingly more sophisticated in how we sort of try to understand these concepts. Generally speaking, as we heard in your introductory remarks, Fred, and just now as well from HECO, that generally speaking, a lot of the literature and particularly the commentary as well has been marked by a simplistic approach for the most part. And sort of there's a tendency towards like a zero sum, I mean this is just a quick rundown, a zero sum approach to the subject, what I'm labeling here, a maximal approach and a minimal approach. In other words, it's all or nothing and again it's sort of the maximal approach we tend towards the primordial frame of reference and the minimal would I think came out as a reaction or as a backlash to the maximal approach but I think it went so far in the other direction that it ended up being as absurd as the position it's set out to attack. So whilst the maximal approach is obsessed with the concept of sectarian identity, the minimal approach is allergic to it. And both cases it's very counterproductive to take these stances. So this volume and several other recent works have gone beyond this level of simplification. Other debates that have marked the study of sectarian relations, I mean here's a question that comes up often, should we treat sectarian identity and sectarian relations as a religious issue? Or is it a question of just group solidarities, devoid of religious, a deep religious content? Are sectarian identities fundamentally different from other group identities? And these are important questions because they will dictate how we go about researching them and understanding them. Do we need to delve into historical traditions or religious historical traditions and so-called sacred texts or should we delve into identity theory? And what is the role of religion? Because even if it is just a group identity, it's still coded religiously, there's still a religious codification. So what role does religion play if it's not as a primary driver, as a theological driver? And finally, are sectarian identities inherently more problematic than other group identities such as race or ethnicity or tribe or what have you? So these are questions that repeatedly come up in the study of this field and they're tricky questions. As in an attempt to try to answer these questions, I suggest that maybe a useful starting point would be to recognize that sectarian identity is imagined on several layers simultaneously and that we may be missing a trick if we insist on viewing them either as a religious identity or a national identity or this or that. It strikes me that they're simultaneously imagined on these four levels. And I think one's perception and how one imagines one's sectarian identity and how one perceives the sectarian other will depend on which of these registers primarily in play at a given time. So the local level, I mean this is about sectarian identity at the sub-national levels. It could be about family, rivalries at the level of a neighborhood or a village or a town or a city. So bringing it back to the question of where does religion fit in, it strikes me that at the local level, I mean this isn't about religious truths. It's far more likely to be about my neighbor who's from another sect, his son slept with my daughter kind of thing rather than a question of contested religious truths or metaphysical truths. At the national level, I think this is far more important. I think it's the pivot around which modern sectarian identities revolve. People often suggest nationalism and national identity as a cure to so-called sectarianism. I think this is very misplaced because more often than not in the modern nation state, sectarian identity is sort of a lens through which national identity is filtered or seen, through which national identity is mediated. So, and we see this in Syria, we see it in Iraq and other places where what's at stake really is contested national truths rather than contested religious truths and it's about the hierarchy of power between amongst the different sectarian groups and I think Keco, really you sort of hit the nail on the head with the description of how people perceive the alignment of their sectarian identity and their political fortunes and what those people think are opened and closed by sectarian identity. So I think the national level is really important. Again, not much room for religious truths here. I imagine that Saudi Arabia would be rather exceptional here given that religion is quite overtly used as a criterion for inclusion and a criterion for citizenship but maybe we can discuss that in the Q and A. But certainly in the case of Iraq and Syria and Bahrain, I'd add as well and Lebanon. I mean, the Lebanese fought each other for 15 years. It was never about imposing religious orthodoxy. So again, I'm a bit skeptical about the role of religion there. The third level, the Meta Nair, Wangkwang, the Meta National level, that's the religious level. That is where religion comes in and you see it in sectarian polemics between people who come from different countries. So it's the Lebanese Shi'i debating sectarian identity with an Indonesian Sunni. It will very much be about religion and religious truths. Whereas if they're from the same country, it's much more likely to be about national truths, demographics, political entitlement, et cetera, et cetera. Finally, the regional or the transnational level, this is where things like Arab-Iranian rivalry comes in. This is where geopolitics come in. And I think that final level, which is sort of a sense of a transnational solidarity that sometimes comes out, that last level is what might make sectarian identities trickier than other so-called primordial identities, such as race and what have you, because you end up with a foreign sect-coded political rival, and that facilitates the superimposition of geopolitics onto sectarian identity, thereby blurring the line between the two. And what that leads to is the securitization of sectarian plurality within the single nation-states, thereby complicating sectarian relations in the single nation-state. Now my chapter looked at Iraq primarily. So I tried to take in the pre-2003 legacy and post-2003 developments. And again here, I think, Heko, you sort of beat me to the punch. And that I'd say in 2003, again, I like the phrase you use, society was primed for sectarianization. It wasn't inevitable that Iraq would go down the route of identity politics, but I think it was always likely in 2003 because of that moment, because of 2003 and the immediate years prior to that, there was a cumulative chain of events that made it likely that this happened, that this would happen, I beg your pardon. So sectarian relations were fundamentally transformed in 2003, but what came after 2003 didn't come out of nowhere. It was building on an older legacy. One thing I will say about Iraq, I think it's really important to keep this in mind. And this is why I don't use the word sectarianism, to be honest, because it has an air of sort of operating like a light switch. It's either on or off. It's either sectarianism or isn't. The reality is sectarian relations in post-2003 Iraq have gone through several shifts. And how sectarian identity is imagined on each of these phases is completely different. And I think our commentary outside of Iraq has struggled to keep up with the pace of change, which is why more often than not it's out of date. Now a lot of these, the ebbs and flows across these various phases, a lot of this relates to state legitimacy. And I'd say that state legitimacy also features quite heavily in how Iraqis reacted to regime change. In how they reacted to the post-2003 political order. And while I've labeled this sort of this debate within Iraq, I labeled it as the dynamic between Shia-centric state building and Sunni rejection. And I think that the interplay between these two animates the shifts between these stages. So Shia-centric state building is a fairly low bar despite the grandiose state building you immediately think something quite visionary. It really isn't. It's about taking over the remnants of the pre-2003 state and ensuring that the central levers of the state are in Shia and particularly in Shia-centric hands. And that Shia identities are represented and empowered to the extent of leaving an imprint on the nature of the Iraqi state. That's a low bar and it's a bar that's been met, I'd say irreversibly so, short of another American invasion. Now, once you meet that bar, you're gonna have to present something, you have to go beyond that. And the Shia political classes are now in a position where they have to go beyond the prism of existential sect coded fears. The sectarian others no longer seen as a threat or not an existential threat anyway, which was not the case in earlier phases. So that's Shia-centric state building, Sunni rejection, a spectrum of resentment against the post-2003 order running from begrudging acceptance to armed insurgency. Now, I'm suggesting, I would suggest, I think the book was written slightly too early for this, but I would suggest that the events of 2014, the fall of Mosul, the subsequent war against Islamic State and what have you, may have discredited the violent end or the armed end of that spectrum of resentment. And so what I'm dabbling with these days is, did 2014 signal the end or the culmination of this dynamic? Sort of the triumph of Shia-centric state building and the defeat of Sunni, or at least the defeat of violence and the rejection. In which case are we seeing Iraq move beyond the politics of sect? And I think this is important in that, whilst we have to understand processes of sectarianization and what have you, it's not a one-way road. I mean, eventually no identity can remain activated or mobilized forever. So how do these things lose relevance? Perhaps through things like this, perhaps we're seeing this happening in Iraq today. And we are seeing a more confident style of Shia politics, shall we say, that's born of the fact that they no longer feel that whatever political gains they think they've made, they don't feel that this is on the threat anymore. And I think that Iraq is light years ahead of the rest of the region in terms of sectarian relations and in terms of how the sectarian other is imagined. And I know that sounds counterintuitive, given that Iraq is sort of evergreen bad news, but it's true in terms of the demonization of the sectarian other is not as fantastical as it is elsewhere in the region. And it's grounded in a more nuanced experience-based take regarding the sectarian other. And what we are today, I think, the sectarian other might be loved, he might be hated, but he's no longer seen as an existential threat, both ways. And that opens a window of opportunity for Iraq. Whether or not that window will be squandered, time will tell. I'll leave it there. Great, perfect. That was great, everyone. Thank you. I've got questions, but I want to turn it over to the audience. Hopefully those questions will come up. We'll take questions three at a time. Please do introduce yourself. Floor's open. Stunned them with your- there you go. There's one. Sorry, yes. Hi, I'm Mona Yacubian from the US Institute of Peace. My question really picks up where the last participant left off. And that is the idea that, well, Heiko, you noted that while Syrian society was primed for some sort of sectarian response, you also talked about, but for some sort of enlightened political leadership that might have staved that off. And I want to understand- That's utopian. Sorry? That's utopian. OK, well, then maybe you're going to answer my question. Fast forward to where we are today, talking about Iraq, perhaps being light years ahead. What kinds of responses at the government level could perhaps begin to look toward a diminution of the role of sectarian identity? And is there a role for outsiders, particularly the United States, to play in that? Michelle Dunn from Carnegie Endowment. I have a question about Saudi Arabia. So with this possibility that somehow the Wahhabism will be downplayed, or as you said, sort of slowly downgraded somehow by the Saudi state, by the royal family, what kind of reception does that get in society? I mean, we hear very kind of different things about where Saudi society is, where different groups, age groups, or socioeconomic groups of the society might be in terms of their attachment to Wahhabism. Sean Coughlin from the State Department. Regarding the discussion of sectarian identity and nationalism, in the context of Syria and Iraq, there have been rampant atrocities committed by all sides of these conflicts. And I'm wondering if you could speak to how identity in the context of sectarianism, or nationalism, or religion intersect with notions of justice, in particular justice post-conflict for victims of atrocities. You want to take the Syria, the first question? Well, I mean, I said utopian. I mean, an enlightened leadership that could have avoided that this trajectory did not exist, obviously. And I think it could not possibly exist. I mean, had it existed at that point, we wouldn't have reached that point. So everybody was very devastated with the speech of Bashar al-Assad on March 13, 2011. Somebody has counted. And basically, he used the word fitna, Arabic word for sedition, 17 times by that count in one speech. And so of course, if you go out and warn against something like that, then you prepare your followers for it to happen. And this is exactly the opposite of the illuminated leadership that you can speak about. I mean, the idea that the way this regime was built, the top level could have gone to society, so to speak, and say, OK, I mean, we realize there's a problem. We realize we have this. Everything has to change. We have to change. We wouldn't have been in 2011, but we were, when had this mindset existed in any shape or form. And indeed, the view was, this is an attack on us. Nothing else. I don't think there was any. There were second thoughts about that, from what we know. The role of outsiders, I mean, Farnar could probably speak a long time about the role of outsiders in creating the post-2003 mess. My fear is a bit that if you, I mean, before a second, we think about this imaginary meeting place, let's say, in Geneva, where everybody sits down, and the Syrian regime sits down, the Russians sit down, and say, OK, let's try to think about a post-conflict order that avoids a repetition of this. And of course, again, that's utopian. It will not happen, because our politics point exactly in the opposite direction. If you think about that, for a moment, my fear would be that the result that, in the end, one would settle on doling out sectarian quota, and national quota for the Kurds, as simply the easiest formula. And it's really like a formula that's why I tend to think about Iraq, correct me? I'm too simplistic, but if you don't really want democracy, because it's unwieldy, as in for occupying power, it's very unwieldy, they actually have the locals and the natives speak and participate, then distribute chairs to local leaders. And then you can pretend there's democracy, because everybody is really involved and represented, but nobody has a say. They have a say because you gave it to them, and hence they don't. So that would be my fear for if that were to happen. I think an alternative could have been, and in some places it may still be, although the way where things went the last two years, I don't know, one way could have been, potentially, to rebuild society or the state, if you want, from below, to empower local administration, local community, local councils to run their own thing, organize their whole thing, and then rebuild the state from bottom to top. Now that's not necessarily going to look very democratic in our sense either, because in the end, many of the areas that are today rebel health, you have very strong parochial structures. You have local families that run everything, and that you have sometimes local council elections, and in some places it's really a family of, in others it's not. I mean, at least that's a place where you could try, and in some places it could, it's going back, in some places it is going better than others. Still going, some still places in Idwit that are not controlled by Al Qaeda, and where you have local council elections, and they go quite demographically, and even women participate and get elected. So I mean, had one started three or four years ago of doing that systematically, maybe the outcome could have been better, I don't know. The atrocities, sorry, I'm taking all the time. I mean, again, I try- Jump into the answer. You speak to atrocities, I mean, there was enough. Yeah, yeah, and not that there's any shortage of it in Syria. But yeah, I mean, if I understood the question correctly about how these atrocities influenced the intersection between national identity and sectarian identity, well, if that's the question, I would say that what we've seen in Iraq and definitely what we've seen in Syria, indeed in Lebanon, atrocity has strengthened the tendency, or rather, yeah, has fortified sect-centric imaginings of a shared nationalism. As I said, I think the way, the place of nationalism in these conflicts is that it's not an absence of nationalism, it's a lack of agreement as to the contours of nationalism, the contents of a shared nationalism. It's a clash of two sect-centric nations or more sect-centric nationalisms. Atrocity plays a big role in augmenting that because it brings in the issue of victimhood. And you look at a place like Iraq, of course, this is a thing that Shia's have been, you know, sort of a trope that they carried for many decades, many generations, its central to Shia identity come 2003 with the emergence of a Sunni sect-centric consciousness. Again, it revolves around victimhood to a very, very significant extent. And it's sort of this dynamic of competing victimhoods, and it's a very destructive dynamic because it stands in the way of a truly national politics emerging. It stands in the way of reaching across the aisle, so to speak, with an eye to de-escalation. So yeah, and we've definitely seen that in Iraq and Syria as well, I'd say. So in that regard, your question as to how to address justice is very important, and I think there needs to be a lot of thought into that. There's the truth and reconciliation route, there's also the amnesia route. And some context, I mean Spain being an obvious one here where the amnesia route actually, as unsatisfactory as it is, it helped turn the page. So who knows? Saudi Arabia. I was Saudi, dealing with religious change in Saudi Arabia. I was, the last time I was in Saudi Arabia was shortly after the religious police had been stripped of their authority to arrest. And I talked to a number of educated Saudis about it, they're all kind of liberal and on board, but they are a little bit worried that the Crown Prince is moving too quickly to counteract the influence of the clerics. And particularly with the women's driving issue, which was kind of, which was a very symbolic issue. I don't expect there to be a backlash, but I think that it is certainly alienating a certain segment of the country, but I feel that the Crown Prince has basically placed a bet where he's going to side with those people who want women to drive and who think that he doesn't, who are more interested in jobs than religious purism. And I hope that he wins that bet, but there's always a possibility that he's wrong. Afshan, let me ask you one. Oh, sorry, we got one? Yeah, go for it, yeah. Vince Elfaso, independent consultant. I was gonna ask about the Iran-Saudi rivalry and given the full U.S. support to the Saudis with arms deals, Saudi has a pure tank of Wahhabism. And I was wondering if U.S. support to Saudi Arabia, not saying that we should pull back, but is that, is taking a side in the Saudi Iran rivalry is this fueling the sectarianism or in terms of Iran with the JCPOA deal? I mean, wouldn't the U.S. for U.S. interests, wouldn't the U.S. want to see a balance in the region? I mean, given that a lot of these differences are incredibly broad, incredibly complex, what would a balance do for U.S. interests? The Fulina Persian Gulf, the Uday-Deir base in Qatar, military bases, economic cooperation and GCC. Can you comment on that? Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's obviously two or three or more perspectives that you can sort of answer this from as to say the country's involved, right? From the U.S. perspective, at least if we can step back to the previous administration, I think balancing those interests was certainly part of what the Obama administration was trying to get across or at least approaching a way that you could balance not just sort of the Saudi-Iran conflict, but even just the U.S.-Iran tensions. And there are areas where we could do this, but there are also areas that we couldn't do this, right? There's Syria where we clearly claim out on either sides, and that's a hard bridge to gap. It was sort of unfathomable that we could support Assad, but we weren't sort of willing to do the same thing that Iran was willing to do in support of our allies. The JCPOA itself, of course, was a step in that direction from a U.S.-Iran bilateral perspective, but when it came to Iran, to the U.S. relationship with Arab allies in the Gulf, it had the opposite effect on them. It alienated them. It felt like their concerns were being thrown under the bus. And so in order to sort of counteract the grievances that our allies had, things like Yemen fall into that space, right? So you're going to agree with Iran on this nuclear program. You're going to sort of allow them to, you're going to remove sanctions and allow it just to be a nuclear issue, but you're not going to push back on Iran's extraterritorial sort of operations. You're not going to push the terrorism issue. You're not going to push human rights, whatever. So in order to that, I always saw Yemen as just sort of a, well, we'll contribute in this way to this security concern of yours without necessarily thinking of the larger regional implications of it, right? It was more sort of, well, we gave a cookie to this side. We're going to give a cookie to this side. I mean, that's maybe a little bit crude, but I don't think it was all that removed from actuality. Now, if you fast forward to the current administration, it's a little more difficult. One, because this administration has a different sort of political perspective on the Middle East and it's been sort of clear about that, but also if you're Iran, Iran has not made it easy to bridge this gap. Even though we've had this nuclear deal, Iran's sort of stated objectives in the region have always been anti-American, right? They're the removal of U.S. forces from the Persian Gulf in particular. They're the removal of U.S. influence in places like Iraq. They're anti-Israel, which is a key U.S. ally. So Iran has also not been willing to sort of find areas of compromise. Iran, from my perspective, has been a bit more maximalist in terms of its foreign policy, not nuclear policy, it compromised on that. In terms of its foreign policy, it's been a bit more maximalist in challenging the United States of what we can get across. So yeah, I think from a U.S. perspective, there are areas where it'd be meaningful and make sense to sort of smooth out differences with Iran. Iraq, I think, is the best example of that, but both structural reasons, because of U.S. alliances and U.S. interests and objectives, but also Iranian interests and objectives make that sort of impossible at the moment. That's not to say it can't happen in the future, but I think there is no trust, and when there's no trust, there's only competition, and I think that competition is something that's very much alive and not going away anytime soon. Great, we've come to the end of the first panel. I want to thank you all for a great sort of tour of sectarian relations in the region. Please join me in thanking the panel. We're gonna take a 15 minute break for the next one. Thank you. Thank you.