The Shias Are Sitting On All of the Oil and Gas While the Sunnis and Shias have been competing for more than a thousand years, they have largely co-existed peacefully until recently. Why are they involved in an open war across multiple countries now? Much of modern geopolitics is driven by hydrocarbons … i.e. oil and gas. Is this true of the Sunnis-Shia war? Yes, the U.S. and its allies are backing the Sunnis against the Shias … in order to wage war for oil. And it turns out that the lion’s share of oil in the Middle East happens to be located in Shia countries … and in the Shia-minority sections of Sunni-majority countries. Specifically, as Jon Schwartz reports this week at the Intercept: Much of the conflict can be explained by a fascinating map created by M.R. Izady , a cartographer and adjunct master professor at the […]