Mideast instability ripples around the world

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WASHINGTON – The Syrian civil war, the potential for it to spill over into Lebanon, the possible humanitarian disaster due to the flow of more than a million refugees and the ouster of a democratically elected president of Egypt even though he is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood all pose a serious challenge to the security of the U.S. and its allies in the Levant, according to report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

Those allies include Jordan and Turkey as well as Israel.

"The onset of the Arab spring protests in 2011 brought dynamic changes to the political landscape of the Middle East and North Africa," according to a report of the open intelligence Langley Intelligence Group Network, or Lignet.

"Two and a half years later, the upheaval, which continues unabated in Egypt and Syria, is metastasizing across the region as it spirals out of control," the report said.

In just the Syrian civil war alone, more than 100,000 people have been killed, and it is said to have unleashed the worst humanitarian crisis since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Syria is "increasingly turning into a regional, if not a global, battleground," according to Robert Serry, the top United Nations envoy for the Middle East peace process.

In Egypt, the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi by the military after only a year in office has galvanized Islamists in the country. The Muslim Brotherhood in particular has threatened to create its own Egyptian Free Army to mirror the Syrian Free Army that comprises the opposition to the Syrian government.

Because of the Syrian civil war, more than 1.8 million refugees have left for neighboring countries, particularly Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Another 1 million Syrian refugees have become displaced persons while remaining in the country.

Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour has called the region a humanitarian disaster zone.

And with the instability in Syria, it quickly is becoming a beachhead for al-Qaida, always ready to take advantage of turmoil. The terrorist group is becoming an increasing security problem.

Al-Qaida members also are hoping to obtain advanced weapons from the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with the potential to access the tons of chemical weapons Syria is assessed to have.

According to U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, it will cost the U.S. more than $1 billion a month to keep Syria's stockpiles of chemical weapons away from the Islamist radicals.

This would include the need to secure the stockpiles with special operations forces, and even then, Dempsey isn't optimistic that all of the chemical weapons could be controlled.

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