CAIRO: The Shiite leaders of Iran and the Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia traded insults over the deaths of hundreds of Iranian pilgrims near Mecca. The government of Bahrain, long criticized for repressing the country's Shiite majority, expelled the Iranian ambassador, after accusing Iran of shipping arms to Bahrain and trying to foment "sectarian strife." And a group of hard-line Sunni clerics in Saudi Arabia, fired up by Russia's intervention in Syria, issued a scathing sectarian call for holy war. Events over the last few weeks have raised fears of an accelerating confrontation between the region's Shiite and Sunni Muslims, with Saudi Arabia and Iran escalating their power struggle,...
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