Graham E. Fuller: Says after fall of Ba’athist regime, collapse of Sunni Ba’athist authority and the region’s geopolitical polarization, a deep rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran on question of identity and positioning increased. Meanwhile, within occurring of the Arab Spring, the battlefields of conflict between the two powers expanded, in a way that crossed the Gulf.
Conflicts between Iran and Arabian include (Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and Iraq), as well as the issue of Iran’s nuclear activities, which the United States and the 1+5 countries now argue that Iran has reached the final stage of creating atomic bombs, are the main part of crisis in relations between these two countries. The conflict between these two countries reached danger situation after Yemen’s Hussein, who are a militia force belonging to the Islamic Republic of Iran, attacked the Capital of Arabistan in early November 2017 by ballistic missiles that capable of reaching 750 kilometers.
“The Shia Crescent, the core of Iran’s geopolitics”
One of the biggest challenges to Iran-Arabistan relations is geopolitics. This geopolitics begins in the Persian Gulf and extends to Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
The Iranian regime has consistently tried to develop its influence in the Arab world in the past three decades, from Baghdad to Beirut to Sana’a, Manama and Damascus. The most powerful tool of Iranian regime to carrying out its plan is creating a Shia Crescent.
Who used the Shia Crescent for the first time?
Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein the King of Jordan used the phrase in an interview in 2004. The use of this term as a geopolitical threat by the King occurred within the fall of Ba’athist regime as a representative of Iraq’s Sunni movement and reaching the Shia to the power.
