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Since the Iraqi exodus began, Geramana’s population has nearly doubled, driving up rents, prices and hostility. Maher Mohammad, 42, a Geramana resident, said: “The Syrian citizen is bearing the burden. I like the Iraqi people and I know they are suffering a lot from the war and terrorist attacks, but these are not the Syrian citizens’ problems.”

Iranian influence is increasingly being felt across Syria. Its first car-making plant is Iranian; a new fleet of buses for Damascus is coming from Iran and Syria’s first private-sector power plant is being built by Iran.

There is also growing tension in Jordan, where Mustafa Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi asylum-seeker, was attacked with a knife in Amman in October. “I was going to school when ten boys came up to me and said ‘Come here Iraqi Shia, you helped the Americans capture Saddam Hussein’,” he told The Times. “The largest boy held me down and they slashed my face. I’m sure things are going to get worse.”

Since the US-led invasion of Iraq, his parents don’t go to the mosque because their distinctive Shia rituals set them apart.

A few streets away, their friend Umm Mohammed’s two sons — the only Shias in their class — came home from school last week in tears. “Our religion teacher came the classroom and said ‘You are Shia, and it is halal (religiously permitted) to kill Shia in Islam. You are not good Muslims like us’,” Haidar, 14, told The Times. “My classmates said nothing. They used to be my friends, but now nobody talks to me.”

Nasser Joudeh, a Jordanian government spokesman, insisted that Jordan did not exclude Iraqis except on security grounds, saying: “We don’t have a Sunni-Shia problem.”

Yet the Middle East’s so-called “miderate” states such as Jordan are alarmed by the rising prominence of the anti-Western alliance that has emerged in recent months, grouping Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and various other players. Some fear that it is a bid by a resurgent Shia community inspired by Iran to alter the sectarian balance of power at the expense of Sunnis. They are irritated at apparent overturnes by the US toward Damascus and Tehran, fearing that it will be at the expense of Washington’s traditional regional allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

But on the ground, there are bonds of nationality that cross the Sunni-Shia divide. At a near-deserted Jordanian taxi rank late one night this week, The Times watched as a misguided Iraqi Shia tried to persuade a cab to take him back to Iraq.

He was desperate to see his family. But the drivers, all Sunni Iraqis, spurned a lucrative fare by convincing him not to run the gauntlet of Sunni insurgents along the 400-mile route. His suicidal would-be fare was sent back to Amman. One driver said that he did not want to see a fellow Iraqi die: “He is a Shia. I am a Sunni, but we know they will kill him on that road. They will drag him from our car and kill him and we won’t be able to do anything.”

Additional reporting by Rana Sabbagh-Gargour in Amman and Hugh Macleod in Damascus

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