SAYEDA ZAINAB, Syria — One of the hottest-selling items in Mustafa Hahel's shop here off Baghdad Street is a poster showing the leaders of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah side by side, smiling pleasantly and surrounded by roses and daffodils. Portraits of the founder of Hamas are on sale just down the road.
"This is one country, Syria and Lebanon, and as for Iran, how can the average person be anything but grateful to Iran for supporting the resistance?" said Hahel, whose business lies outside one of the most famous shrines in Shiite Islam, the mosque of Sayeda Zainab.
If there is a crossroads for the Middle East's axis of fundamentalist Shiites, hard-line Sunnis and Arab nationalists, it must be in this dusty, gridlocked suburb of Damascus. Angrily dispossessed people have landed in succession from the Palestinian territories, Iraq, Iran and southern Lebanon, whose residents have been arriving dazed and tearful by the car- and busload for days.
There is broad opposition to the U.S. and Israel across the Middle East. But the resistance heroes, radical clerics and rogue heads of state dear to the residents of Sayeda Zainab include the late Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian leader Bashar Assad. They are the figureheads of an increasingly powerful alliance aimed at countering U.S. and Israeli policy.
"We are different in every single scope in this community," said Wasef Mahmoud, a 31-year-old Palestinian whose family left northern Israel after the creation of the Jewish state in 1948. "But we have one thing in common: Israel is against us, and we are against Israel."
They are against the United States too. At a religious school housing Lebanon refugees, an American's brief query Wednesday was met with angry shouts and a plea from the proprietor to leave as quickly as possible to avoid trouble.
"Death to America!" three men shouted, rushing at the door before being pulled back. "We hate you!"
Many Lebanese, who pressed Syria to withdraw from their country last year, would disagree with Hahel's characterization of Lebanon and Syria as one country. But it was Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that first sent Shiite Lebanese fleeing toward the ornate mosaic and silver-spangled shrine here dedicated to the prophet Muhammad's granddaughter. Many of them subsequently returned home.
