Will Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad resign and what will the regional repercussions be? Who will be the new ruler of Syria and how will that impact the country's neighbours? Lebanon, for one, will not be the same. It is the one country that will inevitably be tremendously impacted by a regime change in Syria. While North Africa is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, with the notable exception of a large Coptic Christian community in Egypt, the religious composition of the people of the Middle East, or the Asiatic section of the Arab world, is much more complex. Shia Muslims constitute a majority of the population of Iraq, the most populous country in Arab Asia. Sunni Muslims are a majority in much of the Arabian Peninsula. There are pockets of Shia Islam, notably in eastern Saudi Arabia and Bahrain as well as Yemen. Christian minorities are found in considerable numbers in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan as well as Iraq. There are other religious minorities such as the Druze of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. Ethnically, there are large concentrations of Kurds in northern Iraq and Syria. Throughout the region historically called the Fertile Crescent -- Mesopotamia and the Levant -- there are numerous ethnic and religious minorities such as the Armenians, the Assyrian Christians, the Chaldean Christians and countless others. However, the main religious divide is the Shia Muslim/Sunni Muslim one. A further complication is the imposition of the Zionist entity, the state of Israel, as a homeland for Jews. Syria is at the crossroads and its geographical location, straddling the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, makes it of paramount importance. The nature of the Syrian regime that will inherit the corridors of power in Damascus will determine the direction of the entire region. Two other non-Arab regional players -- Sunni Muslim Turkey and Shia Muslim Iran -- have been fighting wars by proxy in Syria. Iran supports the Al-Assad regime, which is controlled by the Alawite sect, considered Shia Muslim even though they differ from the type of Shia Islam practised in Iran and Iraq. Turkey, on the other hand, is a staunch supporter of the Syrian Free Army and forces fighting the Baath regime in Syria. So while in North Africa the main political polarisation is between Islamists and secularists or liberals, in the Middle East the likely power struggle is decidedly religious in nature between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims. There are definite signs Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf Arab states are sympathetic to the anti-Assad forces. Meanwhile Iran, Hizbullah in Lebanon, and probably Shia dominated Iraq are partial to Al-Assad's regime. While the civil war in Syria, unlike the civil war in Libya, or the revolutions of Egypt and Tunisia, have had no serious regional ramifications beyond their borders so far, the grave implications on Syria's immediate neighbours, Arab and non-Arab, will be felt soon. It would be sad to see the region split along religious lines because this will certainly slow down the pace of democracy and lock the Fertile Crescent and Arabian Peninsula into a long-term fight between the Shia/Sunni confessional divide.
