Sunni Shia rivalry started ,1400 years ago because Muhammad never named his successor nor bothered to compile the Qur'an despite having announced that the Torah was revealed to Musa (Moses) , the Injeel (gospel) to Issa..They were written and compiled books in the Bible then. When he died the verse of stoning as from Aisha had already been eaten by a goat.

The Unholy War between Iran and
Iraq
by David Reed
Reader's Digest (Aug. 1984 pg. 39)
Both East and West risk being drawn, against their
better judgment, into grisly conflict.
Hundreds of Iranians boys at a time, many as
young as ten to twelve, come in waves. Some
carry rifles and some are unarmed. Their mission
is to detonate mines and draw fire in preparation
for full-scale attacks Iraqi lines. The boys carry
plastic keys to heaven. They have been assured
by their leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, that
if they are killed on the battlefield they will go
directly to paradise. "The purest joy in Islam,"
Khomeini has explained, "is to kill and be killed
for Allah."
The war between Iraq and Iran, which enters its
fifth year this September, has become a top
concern in the West. Iraq, with known reserves
surpassed only by Saudi Arabia, is one of the
richest oil states on the Persian Gulf. The
Iranians have recovered all the territory won
from them by Iraq in the earlier stages of the
war. If Iraq should fall, Saudi Arabia and the
other Gulf states would be in danger. Saudi
Arabia in untested militarily. Kuwait, Bahrain,
Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Iman have
only token armed forces. Khomeini could
conceivably, bring the fabulous oil-fields of the
Gulf under his control. If so, the West and Japan
would be subjected to excruciating blackmail.
Khomeini had no interest in a negotiated peace.
Instead, he seeks to overthrow the secular
government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
and replace it with a puppet regime modeled
after his own fanatical Islamic one. Iraq had
called repeatedly for a ceasefire, but Khomeini
says the war will end only when the "heretic"
Saddam is overthrown and Iraq agrees to pay
100, 000 million pounds in "war reparations."
"This is not a war for territory," the Ayatollah
thunders. "It is a war between Islam and
blasphemy." Saddam Hussein, in turn, sneers at
Khomeini as a "Shah in a turban."
Khomeini has what he regards as a powerful fifth
column in the region. While the rulers of Iraq and
the Gulf states all follow the Sunni branch of
Islam, they govern substantial populations of
Shiites, the rival branch. 50% of all Iraqis are
Shiites, as is a majority of the Iraqi armed
forces. Khomeini, a Shiite, has been inciting
Shiites in Iraq and the Gulf states to rise against
their Sunni overlords.
There has been bitter enmity between the
Iranian and Iraqi leaders since the 1970s, when
Khomeini, having been exiled as a trouble-maker
by the Shah, took up residence in Iraq, at the
Shiite holy city of An Najaf. There he involved
himself with Iraqi Shiites. Under pressure from
the Shah, Saddam Hussein ordered him out in
1978. "He ate Iraqi bread and drank water from
the Euphrates," Saddam Hussein declared, "but
he was ungrateful."
A year later Khomeini was back in Iran as a head
of a revolutionary government, and thirsting for
revenge.
While Khomeini is shrilly anti-American, Saddam
Hussein is only a little less so. "We have no
diplomatic relations with the Americans because
we consider them to be enemies of the Arab
nation and enemies of Iraq," he has declared, in
commenting on US support of Israel. He is pro-
Soviet, avowedly Socialist and virutently anti-
Israel.
None the less, Washington has abandoned its
initial neutrality and has "tilted" towards Iraq.
Iraq gets all the arms it needs from Moscow and
France, but Washington has provided 600 million
pounds worth of grain on credit. Although they
gave little sympathy for some of Saddam
Hussein's policies, such as Arab leaders as
Jordan's King Hussein, Egypt's President
Mubarak and Saudi Arabia's King Fahd also back
him because of their fear of Khomeini.
American, British and French are stationed in
and near the Gulf to ensure that the flow of oil
continues. Each day, tankers carry 8 million
barrels through the Strait of Hormuz, the 40 mile
wide chokepoint at the entrance to the Gulf.
This oil accounts for only 4% of US needs, but
Western Europe depends on the Gulf for around
30% of its oil, and Japan for some 60%. After
Khomeini threatened to blockade the strait,
President Reagan declared: "There's no way that
we could allow that channel to be closed."
The war begins in earnest in Basra, Iraq's second
largest city and main port before the war closed
it down. Basra is situated on the Shatt al Arab
("River of the Arabs", a confluence of the Tigris
and the Euphrates that flows into the Gulf. For 4
years, more than 80 ships from all over the world
have been anchored in the Shatt, trapped by the
war.
A Sheraton hotel overlooking the waterway
remains open business - but there are few
takers. Day and night, artillery shells streak into
Basra from Iranian batteries at the front, some
20 miles to the east. Sandbags have been piled
along Basra's streets to protect citizens from
shelling, but people are killed almost every day.
The main front line reminds one of such First
World War battlefields as Verdun, or the Somme,
with massive, static concentrations of troops.
Iraqi soldiers huddle in trenches and bunkers,
peering out through barbed wire at a ravaged no
man's land that separates them from the Iranian
lines. Furious artillery duels go on almost
continuously. An especially unpleasant echo of
the First World War is the Iraqi use of the
mustard gas and modern nerve gases against
the Iranians. Observers feel that Saddam
Hussein's decision to use these outlawed
weapons reflects his growing desperation.
Saddam Hussein started the war in September
1980, when his troops invaded Iran. Ostensible
justification for the attack was a long standing
dispute about which country has sovereignty
over the Shatt al Arab. Iran lies on its eastern
shore and Iraq on its western.
Until 1975 Iraq claimed sovereignty over the
waterway right up to the Iranian shore. That
year, however, the Shah of Iran, then at the
height of his power, forces Saddam Hussein to
relinquish Iraq's sovereignty over the eastern
half of the Shatt. Saddam Hussein regarded this
as a humiliation, but to accept the Shah's
dictate. In return, the Shah stopped supporting
Kurdish tribesmen who had rebelled against the
Baghdad government.
At the time of the 1980 invasion, Iran seethed
with revolutionary disorder. The Shah had been
overthrown that year before, and Khomeini was
trying to consolidate his position. Saddam
Hussein thought Iran would be a push-over. But
even those Iranians who were against Khomeini
rallied in the face of the foreign attack.
Knowledgeable sources report that well over
50,000 Iraqis have been killed in action while
Iranian have been killed in action while Iranian
casualties may be as high as 200,000. Even Iraqi
soldiers have been appalled by the Iranian
practice of sending boys on suicidal missions.
Says one, "When we capture them, they cry for
their mothers." More than 200 are being held at
a camp in Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad.
These young prisoners say that when they
recruited, they were told they would be reserve
troops, guarding Iranian cities in the rear. Instead
they found themselves at the front, after only a
few days of training.
A boy named Hassan, who was 12 when
captured, said: "They told us, 'If you don't die a
martyr on the battlefield, you'll be executed in
the rear.'" Gesturing towards a group of boys, an
adult prisoner said: "Each one you see here
represents 100 killed on the battlefield."
The International Committee of the Red Cross
has denounced both Iran and Iraq for battlefield
atrocities, charging them with executing
defenseless and abandoning wounded. Because
Iranian soldiers would rather die as "martyrs"
than surrender, Iraq has only about 8,000 Iranian
prisoners while Iran holds some 50,000 Iraqis.
Despite dragging Iraq into an unwinnable war,
Saddam Hussein is probably more entrenched in
power now than before. Says a European
diplomat: "He has a lot of will, decisiveness and
a ruthless streak." Although war enthusiasm has
vanished, the Iraqi people recoil in horror at the
thought of a Khomeini-style revolutionary
republic.
While Iran's record on human rights is even
worse, Iraq remains one of the tightest police
states in the world. In his 16 years as Iraq's
strong man, Saddam Hussein has come to be
known as the Butcher of Baghdad. Amnesty
International reports that more than 800 political
priso9ners have been executed since 1978 - 300
in 1982 alone. Torture is widely practised.
Saddam Hussein has, however, set Iraq firmly on
a secular course. His monolithic political party,
the Ba'ath (Arabic for "renaissance",
emphatically rejects the idea of an Iranian-style
fundamentalist Islamic state. Iraqi women are
among the most emancipated in the Arab world.
They hold leading government positions and
some have graduated as fighter pilots from Iraq's
air-force academy. Saddam Hussein's own wife
is headmistress of a Baghdad school.
Corruption in Iraq is minimal by Third World
Standards. Iraq's oil revenues have, for the most
part, been spent wisely. Villages have been
electrified, school's built and free health services
and education established.
Everywhere in Baghdad are photographs of
Saddam Hussein, a handsome man of 47, with a
shock of black hair and a big mustache. Huge
blow-ups, giving him a toothy, six-foot grin, have
been erected at roundabouts. He has no military
experience, but he is often shown in combat
fatigues, pistol on hip, and sometimes in the
uniform of a Field Marshal, weighted down with
medals and a huge sword.
So far Iraq's Shiite majority has ignored
Khomeini's cries for an uprising. Arab
nationalism has proved stronger than religious
affinities. Saddam Hussein has sought further to
ensure their loyalty by spending more than 140
million pounds in refurbishing Shiite shrines and
mosques and by lavishing benefits on his
predominantly Shiite soldiers.
Experts on military and Middle Eastern affairs
say that Iraq, dug in defensively and possessing
superior fire-power, should be able to hold the
Iranians off for the time being. After that, the
crystal ball gets murky. If the Iranians ever
seized a substantial amount of Iraqi territory,
Saddam Hussein's high command might jettison
him and sue for peace.
Says a diplomat in Baghdad: "How will it end? It
depends on Khomeini, on whether he changes
his mind, which isn't a characteristic of him, or
whether he is removed from power or dies." As
Khomeini has seen 84 summers, some Iraqis are
counting on the Grim Reaper to come to their
rescue.

Here is another must read for those interested in Islam shia vs sunni 1400 year old war . Place this in context to what is happening today, the declaration that west thinks Islam is a religion of peace and that if Israel ceased to exist There would be peace.

Seven Steps to Islamic State (IS) Part 1
The rise of Islamic State (IS) and its seizure of
large parts of Iraq and Syria have caused alarm
in the West and across the Middle East.
Harrowing images of mass killings and
beheadings of soldiers and journalists have
sparked calls for renewed U.S. intervention in
the region. Alarming as it is, Islamic State has
not risen in a vacuum. In fact IS can be seen as
an outcome of thirty five years of continual
warfare across the Middle East. This post, the
first of three, looks at those thirty five years of
conflict and the seven steps that have led to the
emergence of ISIS.
Step 1 – 1979
The year 1979 saw three events that radically
changed the Middle East. These were the Iranian
Revolution, the seizure of the Mosque in Mecca
by Saudi extremists, and the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 overthrew the
Iranian monarchy and replaced it with a
fundamentalist Shia theocracy under Ayatollah
Khomeini . Khomeini’s rise to power directly
threatened a number of Iran’s neighbours. Under
Khomeini, Shia Iran became a direct threat to the
Al Saud monarchy in Sunni majority Saudi
Arabia. Khomeini condemned the ruling Al Saud
royal family of Saudi Arabia as a corrupt,
illegitimate dictatorship, subservient to American
interests, and incited Saudi Arabia’s Shia
minority to rise up against the Saudi government.
Months later, the Saudi monarchy faced another
threat to its rule, this time from within its own
borders. In November 1979, Sunni insurgents
took over the shrine at Mecca during the annual
Hajj pilgrimage. The rebels called for the
overthrow of the House of Saud which they
claimed was exploiting religion for its own gain,
paying allegiance to Christian America, and
bringing evil and corruption upon Muslims. The
insurgents also slated the Saudi government for
making reforms which they considered un-Islamic
– such as allowing women to drive, allowing
music, TV, and dancing, permitting international
football tournaments, and allowing girls and
women to take part in sports.
In a battle that lasted more than two weeks,
Saudi forces attacked the Grand Mosque and a
protracted gun battle raged within. In the final
days of the battle, as the rebels retreated
underground, the Saudi forces flooded the maze
of underground prayer rooms first with water and
finally with canisters of CS gas to flush out the
remaining rebels. When the siege ended, over
sixty fundamentalist insurgents were publicly
executed in towns across Saudi Arabia.
Finally, in the dying days of what had already
been an historic year, a third event shook the
Middle East when the Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan . In Christmas 1979, Russian
paratroopers landed in Kabul to prop up the
communist government of Hazifullah Amin.
Afghanistan was already in the grip of a civil war
which pitted Amin against rebels opposed to his
efforts to erase Muslim tradition, a move that
had outraged the majority of Afghans. The
invasion marked the beginning of Soviet
occupation that would last for more than a
decade.
Step 2. Saudi Arabia assert’s its primacy as
Defender of Islam
The historic events of 1979 meant that Saudi
Arabia’s rulers were being attacked by powerful
Shia outsiders in Iran as well as by home grown
violent Sunni insurgents. The common charge
from both Iran and the Saudi fundamentalists
was that the Al Saud rulers were not religious
enough.
Saudi King Fahd’s response was twofold. Looking
at the fate of the Shah of Iran, Fahd concluded
that the Shah had been toppled because he had
become estranged from his religious power base.
Fahd moved to placate his fundamentalist
critics. The solution to the threat of religious
fundamentalists, he decided, would be even more
religion.
Within Saudi Arabia, the King reversed liberal
reforms and handed more power to the religious
establishment. King Fahd also took on a new
title – custodian of the two holy places Mecca
and Medina. On the international stage, Saudi
Arabia embarked on a sectarian strategy,
depicting the House of Saud as Sunnism’s
greatest defenders, and portraying Khomeini’s
Shia challenge to the House of Saud as sedition.
Using its immense oil wealth, Saudi Arabia also
launched a worldwide missionary campaign to
combat the Shia teachings of Khomeini’s Iran.
The result was the spread of Wahhibism and
Salafism – the militant forms of Sunnism
predominant in Saudi Arabia – across the Muslim
world. Tens of millions of Korans were
distributed with commentaries approved by the
Saudi ulema. The Kingdom’s embassies around
the world hosted religious attaches whose job
was to get new mosques built and to encourage
existing mosques to teach the Saudi version of
Islam. The Saudi government allocated over $27
billion to this missionary fund. [1]
The war in Afghanistan also presented the Saudi
rulers with a unique opportunity to demonstrate
their primacy as defenders of Islam. The Saudis,
who had always been militant opponents of
communism, now became vigorous supporters of
the Islamic fighters opposing the Soviets in
Afghanistan.
The Afghan war was significant in that it saw the
US and Saudi Arabia collaborating in opposing a
common enemy. In February 1980, U.S.
President Jimmy Carter agreed a covert
programme with the Saudis which would see
both countries fund a guerrilla campaign in
Afghanistan to the tune of more than $3 billion
each over the following decade. (Robert Lacey
p67) While the US saw the fight as one against
communism, the Saudis saw it as a holy war for
Islam. The U.S and Saudi Arabia’s efforts would
result in the emergence of the Taliban and Al
Qaeda.
photo credit: basheem via
photopin cc
photo credit: basheem via photopin cc
Step 3. Iran – Iraq War
The Iranian Revolution had a momentous impact
on the Middle East in another way. In Iraq,
Saddam Hussein saw Ayatollah Khomeini ‘s rise
to power of as a direct threat to his rule.
Hussein, an advocate of rapid modernisation,
promoted secularism, alongside ruthless
dictatorship, as the path to progress. Khomeini
slated Hussein as an infidel, a brutal Sunni tyrant
oppressing his country’s Shia majority, and called
on Iraqi shia to topple him.
In September 1980 Saddam attacked Iran in a
pre-emptive attempt to topple Khomeini before
Khomeini could topple him. Hussein also hoped
to take advantage of the turmoil of the
Revolution to seize Iran’s oil reserves and make
Iraq the region’s dominant power. When he
invaded Iran, Hussein expected his ‘whirlwind
war’ would be over within weeks. Instead it
lasted eight brutal years.
The Iran – Iraq war featured indiscriminate
ballistic-missile attacks on cities by both sides,
but mostly by Iraq; the extensive use of
chemical weapons, mostly by Iraq; and hundreds
of attacks on third-country oil tankers in the
Persian Gulf, which threatened the entire world
economy.
Saudi Arabia and the United States both provided
support for Saddam Hussein. The Saudis wanted
to avoid Hussein’s overthrow, which was likely to
lead to a Shia-led government in Iraq. The U.S.
was concerned about Khomeini’s militant anti-
Westernism, his calls for global Islamic
revolution, and the threat to global oil supplies.
The U.S. was also still suffering from the
humiliation of the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis.
Support from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia allowed
Iraq to acquire advanced weapons and expertise
on a much larger scale than Iran. As a result the
war was highly asymmetrical, with Iran sending
wave after wave of poorly armed infantry to
repel the better armed Iraqi invaders. Twice as
many Iranian soldiers died as Iraqi soldiers during
the war, used their bodies to set off mines and
overrun Iraqi gun positions. Despite the heavy
losses, Iran, with a population of 50 million to
Iraq’s 17 million was able to mobilise seemingly
endless masses of volunteers to defend the
revolution and to defend Islam.
Khomeini used the cult of martyrdom to justify
the rocketing death toll. The regime insisted that
those who died in combat were guaranteed a
place in heaven, and gave the untrained and ill
equipped volunteers arriving at the front a plastic
key representing the key to the gates of
paradise as. This cult of martyrdom has since
become ubiquitous among both Shia and Sunni
extremists. [2]
When the war ended in August 1988 neither side
had achieved its aims. Both Khomeini and
Hussein remained in power. The cost in terms of
lives lost was immense, with conservative
estimates of one million dead.
The Iran-Iraq war was tragically to set the
pattern for future Middle East conflicts – in being
so long, so bloody and so futile.

Here is more

in Early Models
The succession of the Prophet has remained
highly contested throughout the history of
Islamic societies because of its implications for
the nature of the state and its relationship to
Islam. The commonly accepted sequence of
events is that the claim to leadership of the
group of Muslims who migrated with the Prophet
from Mecca ( al-Muharajun ) prevailed over that
of those who welcomed and supported him in
Medina ( al-Ansar ). Reports that the latter group
suggested that there should be a ruler (amir)
from each of the two communities indicates that
they were worried about the risks of consolidated
governance, rather than that they opposed Abu
Bakr as such. This fact is relevant to
understanding the reasons for the rebellion of
other Arab tribes who were suppressed through
what is commonly known as the wars of
apostasy. Abu Bakr finally prevailed over all
other contenders in what Umar called a
“fortuitous coincident” ( falta), which confirms
the political nature of the whole process. One
critical aspect of the enduring controversy of
that process is that some Muslims, who came to
be known as Shi`at Ali (partisans of Ali, hence
the term Shi`a) continued to challenge the
validity of the selection of Abu Bakr over Ali.
Another aspect that is even more significant for
our purposes here is that differing opinions on
the rationale of the selection of any successor
to the Prophet, and the criteria for such
selection, have had profound consequences on
the nature of the state and position of the
Caliphate as institutions.
The wars of apostasy (hurub al-ridda) were the
first crises that the emerging polity faced
immediately after the death of the Prophet
Muhammad. Abu Bakr had to assert the authority
of the state over a number of Arabian tribes that
apparently resisted his authority. The
conventional position held by Muslims is that Abu
Bakr executed those wars because the tribes had
apostatized by following false prophets or by
refusing to pay the zakat , and that either type of
action warranted suppression by force in the
name of Islam. This episode came to be highly
revered in Sunni discourse as the great
achievement of Abu Bakr that confirmed the
validity of his selection as the first Caliph. After
all, it was that consolidation of political power
throughout the Arabian Peninsula that propelled
Muslim expansion into the Byzantine and
Sassanian Empires.
I am not concerned here with the validity of that
dominant view, or whether Abu Bakr was right or
wrong in waging war, but only with the meaning
or significance of that major episode for the
nature of the state at that phase in Islamic
history. Abu Bakr’s determination to fight those
tribes into submitting to his authority as Caliph is
emphasized in his statement about their
withholding zakat: “I swear by God if they
withheld only a hobbling-cord [of a camel] of
what they used to give to the Prophet, I would
fight them for it.” What was the rationale of that
position, and how or why should it be interpreted
to mean that Abu Bakr was asserting his
succession of the Prophet in a religious and not
political sense?
It could be argued that Abu Bakr regarded the
refusal to pay zakat to the treasury of the state
in Medina as tantamount to apostasy, which is
punishable by death. Alternatively, that refusal
could be seen as a rebellion against the authority
of the state as a political institution, which
warranted an effective assertion of that authority
by military force. It is not possible of course to
discuss in detail those protracted and complex
controversies that continued to rage into the
second century of Islamic history. My limited
objective here is to reflect on the implications of
those controversies for the nature of the state at
that formative time, regardless of what one may
think of what Abu Bakr did.
The prominent Companions of the Prophet
( Sahaba), such as Umar and Abu Ubayda, urged
Abu Bakr to “rescind the tax for the year and to
treat the tribes loyal to Islam leniently in order to
enlist their support for those who had abandoned
Islam” (Madelung 1997, 48; Berkey 2004, 261–
64). Others, like Ali, never participated in the
campaign. The existence of such disagreement
on this issue among Muslims is itself significant
for understanding the basis of Abu Bakr’s
decision and its implications for the nature of
the state itself at that time. In fact, when the
leaders of the rebellious tribes were captured
and brought before Abu Bakr, they rejected the
charge of apostasy by affirming that they were
Muslims who were only not willing to pay zakat
to the state (Kister 1986, 61–96).
If Abu Bakr was exercising the religious authority
of the Prophet, Companions of that high standing
would not have disputed any aspect of Abu
Bakr’s decisions if they accepted them as
expressing the religiously binding precepts of
Islam. Yet, despite the Companions’
disagreement with Abu Bakr, they did not
attempt to act on their own in implementing
what they thought was the correct view,
presumably out of respect for Abu Bakr’s
political authority as the Caliph. The view that
came to prevail among Sunni Muslims is that
Abu Bakr had no choice but to fight the rebels to
maintain the authority of the state.
Recalling that I am not presuming to decide who
was right or wrong, the point for our purposes
here is the inherent ambiguity and the risks of
claiming to implement a religious view through
the coercive authority of the state. That
ambiguity may be clarified if we understand the
issues in terms of Abu Bakr’s role as the political
leader of the community, not as a religious one.
The willingness of the leading Companions to
abide by Abu Bakr’s decisions though they
believed them to be wrong may have been
motivated by political factors, especially the
need to consolidate and secure the community
during that critical period. But religious rationales
were also cited for such factors, including verse
4:59 of the Qur’an, cited earlier. In addition to
this obligation to obey the ruler, Muslims also
have the obligation to enjoin justice and oppose
injustice (al-amr bil ma`ruf wa l-nahy an al-
munkar). There is a Sunna report (or maxim) that
no human being should obey what constitutes
disobedience to God (la ta`ata li makhluq fi
ma`siayat al-Khliq).
Thus, whatever justification is considered, it is
difficult to separate the religious aspects from
the political ones: Muslims will always disagree
on both counts, and religious reasoning includes
political considerations and vice versa. Regarding
the wars of apostasy, it is possible that Abu
Bakr’s actions were valid from an Islamic point
of view. For instance, he decided to wage war on
the Arab tribes either as apostates or as rebels
against the state, which warrants the
punishment of death under what came to be
known as the capital crime of waging war
against the community ( hadd al-haraba under
verse 5:33–34). Whatever may have been the
rationale, Abu Bakr was able to enforce his view
over the objections of the leading Companions
because he was the Caliph, and not because he
was “right” or “correct” from an Islamic point of
view. This is not to say that Abu Bakr was right
or wrong, because both are possible, but there
was no possibility of an independent authority
that could have adjudicated or arbitrated his
disagreement with the other Companions.
Conversely, as noted earlier, if Umar or Ali, for
instance, was the Caliph instead of Abu Bakr, the
wars of apostasy would not have occurred.
The conclusion I am drawing here for our
purposes is that it may be helpful to distinguish
between Abu Bakr’s religious view and his
political decisions and actions as the Caliph.
Similarly, some leading Companions disagreed
with Abu Bakr probably on the religious as well
as the political grounds. Such a distinction may
still be difficult for Muslims to see regarding the
Medina period because of the very personal
nature of political authority at the time when the
state hardly existed as a political institution.