Fire, meet gasoline: Things aren't improving in Iraq, as Prime Minister al-Malaki reportedly issues an arrest warrant and requests Interpol help in apprehending Shaikh Harith al-Dhai, leader of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars (Hayat al-Ulama' al-Muslimin), in Amman to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Hassan al-Banna, one of the foundational figures of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimin). Details are sketchy, but the spark appears to have been a purported AMS document calling for the resettlement of Sunni families in the abandoned houses of al-rafida (a pejorative term for Shi'a not previously used by the AMS). If accurate, such a document would be a call by the AMS for ethnic cleansing of Shi'ites.

On the other side, Sunnis are showing a purported SCIRI document warning Shi'ites to prepare for an all-out offensive by Sunnis. Iraqi Accord Front figure Adnan Dulaimi, also in Amman, is calling for Sunni Arabs to come to Iraq to fight the Iranians, who he linked to the Shi'ite Safavid dynasty that ruled Persia for two centuries and forced many Sunni-to-Shi'a conversions.

In Baghdad, the government still maintains that almost all of the Sunnis kidnapped from the Ministry of Higher Education Tuesday have been released, but the Minister of Education claims that at least forty are still hostage and are being tortured. In Ramadi, American troops appear to be leading a determined offensive, but officially deny any serious ongoing military activity despite press reports to the contrary. There is some evidence that a base inside Ramadi, possibly Camp Junction City, where Iraqi police are being trained, may have been dismantled. Junction City has been plagued with security and sanitation issues, so such a move would not be unprecedented.

The worst-case scenario in Iraq is the violence boiling over the borders with regional implications: Sunni and Shi'a fighting over the oil-rich east while radical Sunnis flee into the region's underpopulated center to destabilize Arab states such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The end result would be paramilitary violence erupting along ethnoreligious lines while Turkey, Syria and Iran fight for valuable Iraqi lands and against enemies within Iraq. If general confessional civil war breaks out, we're one step closer to that nightmare.