IN my last column on the Syrian situation I had promised to write on the impact that sectarian strife in that country is having on the region. The anti-Bashar al Assad insurgency, which started some two years ago, was anti-dictatorship and did not have discernible sectarian overtones let alone a sectarian base.

Many Alawites were leading figures in the insurgency. It was, however, the politically motivated assistance, deliberately cast in a religious guise, from the predominantly Sunni governments and donors from the oil-rich Gulf states and the politically and subsequently religiously motivated support from Shia Iran and Hezbollah from Lebanon which converted the struggle into a Sunni-Shia battle.

The battle in Syria affected all neighbours — Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon — but Iraq is perhaps the most affected. That country had already had its share of sectarian violence before and during the American occupation.

This abated after generous dollops of American cash and the promise of political accommodation led the Sunni leaders to expel Al Qaeda and other extremists from Sunni-dominated areas. More recent sectarian incidents followed when the Sunni leadership felt that an increasingly authoritarian Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was marginalising the Sunnis. There is no doubt, however, that the intensity of the strife has increased because of the situation in Syria.

From April to June there were some 2,500 deaths attributable to sectarian attacks. In July the death toll was more than 1050 and during the Eid holidays the festivities were tragically marked by over 70 deaths on Saturday alone.

Last September, some 100 high-value prisoners escaped after the attack on Tikrit Jail and in late July this year attacks on two jails, Abu Ghraib and Taji, secured the release of some 300 high-value prisoners.

The impact has yet to be assessed but terrorism experts recall that the 2006 jailbreak in Yemen freed Nasser al-Wuhayshi who then rejuvenated the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and has now apparently been made the No. 2 man in Al Qaeda central by al-Zawahiri (evidently still in Pakistan’s tribal areas and well protected by Al Qaeda’s Pakistani protégés). A clone of al-Zarqawi — the notorious leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq during the US occupation — may well emerge from among these escapees.

The Islamic State of Iraq — labelled as the Al Qaeda franchise in Iraq — operates freely in Iraq’s Sunni provinces and in Syria. In apparent disregard of al-Zawahiri’s directives, the organisation headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has renamed itself ISIS or the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (Syria) and has taken over many fighters from the Jubhat Al-Nusrah.

Despite the brave statements made by Nouri al-Maliki it is evident that Iraq is well on its way to matching the carnage of the sectarian strife in the Shia-Sunni struggle for power in 2007-2008. Worse, it is possible that the break-up of Syria as a result of the protracted conflict could lead to al-Baghdadi and his ilk merging Iraq’s Sunni-majority provinces with a truncated Syria to create a Sunni Salafist state.

As if this were not enough, Iraq’s internal problems (and those of our Turkish friends) with the Kurds are being compounded by the Iraqi Kurds offering to send assistance to the Syrian Kurds who are looking to create an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria but are now engaged in a fierce struggle for control with ISIS fighters.

Do we see any parallels between Pakistan and Iraq? The sectarian killings in recent months albeit on a smaller scale have been analogous as have been the attacks during the Eid festivities.

The attack on Bannu Jail last year secured the release of scores of militants, among them Adnan Rasheed who is said to have planned the D.I. Khan jailbreak last month which freed some 45 to 50 high-value prisoners. He is now a leader of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan.

But that is as far as the parallel goes. Iraq’s sectarian problem — first a marginalisation of the Shia majority by a ruling Sunni minority and now replaced by a marginalisation of the Sunnis by the Shia majority — is essentially a power-sharing issue. If good sense prevails, a political settlement can be reached before the hatred engendered by sectarian killings becomes deep-rooted.

It is very different with us. We consciously allowed ourselves in the Ziaul Haq era to become the secondary battlefield in the Iran-Iraq war. Religious leaders of both sects welcomed the influx of funds pumped in by Saudi Arabia and Iran. Political opportunism and venality created this evil. Growing intolerance and our seeming inability to check its propagation cannot be politically resolved in the sense of reaching an agreement on power-sharing between the sects. Our sectarianism is a law and order problem.

Unlike Iraq, we have a well-trained and disciplined army and an administrative system that despite the dramatic deterioration of recent years still retains considerable capacity. Given political will we should be able to establish the writ of the state and the rule of law. Like Iraq we must, however, do so before the hatred engendered by sectarian killings becomes too deep-rooted

We do have, however, another problem that Iraq does not. Sectarian forces or their allies — a different plumage should not disguise the fact that they hatch in the same nest and have similar if not identical DNAs — have been allowed to flourish, under foreign and domestic patronage. We should recognise that the utility of these groups was questionable in the past and has become a disastrous liability now.

Today these groups believe they remain relevant only if insecurity prevails domestically and Pakistan’s relations with its neighbours remain fraught. One cannot help but suspect that the killing across the Line of Control and the abortive attack on the Indian consulate in Jalalabad were the handiwork of these groups and were carried out to serve this objective.

We must set political expediency aside and work with unity of purpose to reduce and then eliminate this problem alongside that of sectarianism.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.