23 Guardian Israel should be wary of celebrating the 'Shia crescent! setback Jonathan Spyer 7 September 2011 -- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's backing of the Syrian regime during the recent upheaval has damaged his standing in the Middle East. Photograph: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA In recent years, Israeli strategists have identified an Iran-led regional alliance as representing the main strategic challenge to the Jewish state. This alliance looks to be emerging as one of the net losers of the Arab upheavals of 2011. This, however, should be cause for neither satisfaction nor complacency for Israel. The forces moving in to replace or compete with Iran and its allies are largely no less hostile. The Iran-led regional alliance, sometimes called the muqawama ("resistance") bloc, consisted of a coalition of states and movements led by Tehran and committed to altering the US-led dispensation that pertained since the end of the cold war. It included, in addition to Iran itself, the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, the Sadrist movement and other Shia Islamist currents in Iraq, Syria's Assad regime, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organisation. It appeared in recent years also to be absorbing Hamas. The muqawama bloc presented itself as the representative of authentic Islamic currents in the Middle East, and as locked in combat until the end with the west and its clients. These included Saudi Arabia, Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, and above all, Israel. However, the alliance always had a rather obvious flaw: while presenting itself as an inclusive, representative camp, it was an almost exclusively Shia Muslim club, in a largely Sunni Muslim Middle HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_025019