Sunni Muslim preachers condemned Iran and its "Satanic" Shi'ite allies in Friday sermons, after a battle in Syria that has inflamed sectarian rhetoric which risks spreading violence around the Middle East.
"God, break the backs of Bashar and his supporters," Salah Sultan, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, said at a Cairo mosque. "God, break the back of Hezbollah, the party of Satan, God, break the back of Iran."
Senior Saudi cleric Sheikh Saleh al-Fawzan: Shi'ites, he said, "pretend to be Muslims and try to get closer to the Sunnis ... in order for them to be able to plot against Islam ... these days their hostility has become more apparent in their war against the Sunnis in Syria."
In the Gaza Strip, whose Palestinian Hamas rulers were once allies of Assad and Hezbollah, hardline cleric Imad al-Daya told worshippers that Qusair had exposed the "fraud" of Hezbollah's rhetoric about leading "resistance" to Israel. "Wake up," he told worshippers. "This is a war of religion." Shi'ites, he added, had always been "a knife in Muslims' backs".