US troops leaving Iraq, December 2011: western military activity has unwittingly altered the balance of power throughout the region

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On New Year’s Day Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, addressed the nation on television. In a reflective mood, he said: “Any successful person has his enemies; the righteous have their opponents…and every Hussein has his Yazid.” He was entirely confident that his allusion to seventh century history would be understood, and rightly so. The death of Hussein ibn Ali, the Shia martyr and grandson of the prophet Muhammad, at the hands of Yazid, the founder of the Sunni Umayad dynasty, marks the seminal division of Islam into its separate confessional forms, and the start of an enduring tension between Shia and Sunni which has consequences today. It is difficult to imagine Angela Merkel dropping the protagonists of the Thirty Years War into a speech, or David Cameron citing the dissolution