The murderous Sunni-Shia battle in Iraq is starting to infect other parts of the Middle East. It's spreading in insidious ways: In people's conversations, in the ways Arabs in the region look at events in neighboring nations, in the decisions some are making to take up arms several countries away from home.

On a recent visit to Jordan, I was speaking with a man we often work with on the ground, a Jordanian Sunni, who is as far from a radical Islamist as you can find.

"What the Shias are doing in Iraq, it's making Arabs not want to support Hezbollah in Lebanon."

I was dumbfounded.

"What they did to Saddam Hussein?" I asked.

"That and other things. Nasrallah is going to have to back down with the Lebanese government because people don't want to support the Shias as much as after the war with Israel."

The internal clash between Sunnis and Shias was spreading like a cancer, I thought.

This man was no fan of Saddam Hussein, and I can't say I ever meet anyone in the Middle East who is; yet the grainy cellphone images of his hanging, and the taunts and cries of "Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!" beamed around the Middle East and the world, struck a chord among Sunnis in faraway places across the region. The images hit a raw nerve.

Drinking coffee in a hotel lobby on an unrelated assignment, I felt the full impact of the shift in the region. The Sunni-Shia divide is experiencing a region-wide revival more than 1,400 years after it first led to a split among Muslims.

I remembered the story of the son of an Egyptian banker, a young man in his thirties who was married with two children. Increasingly religious and radical, he one day told his father that he was traveling to Iraq to fight. Against whom? The Americans, the Shias, you name it. He disappeared a few months ago, leaving his young family behind. The last time the father heard from him, I was told, the son was heading to Damascus. He has had no news from him since.

Growing up in a Syrian family in France, I don't once remember hearing the differences between Sunnis and Shias discussed in any great detail. Occasionally, "a Sunni married a Shia," or a Christian man converted to marry a Muslim woman, and that was that. I never learned more than the basics about why the original schism occurred because, in my family, it was simply not considered relevant to my understanding of political and social events in the region.

In my travels across the Middle East as early as last year, I can't think of an instance when a Sunni or a Shia outside of Iraq openly expressed feelings of hostility toward members of the other sect. It was something that was happening in Iraq - something tragic - but a conflict that remained contained within the borders of the war-torn country.

That was the Middle East of the past. Today, the battle lines have multiplied exponentially. It's not "the Arab world against the West" of the Iraq invasion aftermath, it's the Sunnis versus the Shias, the Christians with the Sunnis against the Christians with the Shias, the Sunnis against the West, the Shias with the West, those against the West, the Druze with the Sunnis against the Shias, and the list goes on. The overall conflict is dividing itself into hundreds of splinters. It's not bloody everywhere, of course, but the tension is sewing the seeds of what could explode into other struggles in many other places across the region.

Take Iran and Saudi Arabia: The two regional powers have come to represent the Sunni-Shia divide and despite efforts to smooth things over, tensions still run deep.

Repeated comments from the Saudi King Abdallah who reigns over the bastion of Sunni Islam are binging the Sunni-Shia divide into sharp focus. In a recent interview, he issued a veiled message to Iran that Sunnis would not convert to Shiaism and that his country knows its "role as the state where the message (of Islam) began."

Meanwhile, two senior Saudi clerics declared this month that Shiites were infidels and heretics, describing them as "the most vicious enemy of Muslims."

As for the open battle, look no further than Lebanon. What began as a mainly political struggle between the Hezbollah (Shia)-led opposition and the Sunni/Christian/Druze government of Fouad Siniora is taking an increasing sectarian tone in spontaneous clashes between the youngest of Lebanon's citizens. The Beirut Arab University tiff that turned into an all-out deadly battle raised fears the Sunni-Shia clash was erupting without warning, among those with no memory of the civil war that devastated Lebanon for 15 years. Young, angry people fighting for what they believe to be their identity.

Brace yourself, without strong intelligent leadership in the region to turn things around quickly, many say there can only be more conflict to come.

Funerals are no one’s favorite place, but as a journalist I get to go to more than most.

They can be quite revealing of a situation, at multiple levels, telling you not just about the victim, but the society at large, and this one -- the burial of a young man killed in last week’s clashes between pro- and anti- government protestors at Beirut’s Arab University -- was going to be no different.

On this day, as we drove out of the center of Beirut, the roads were quiet, people still cautious after the blaze of violence that killed four and wounded more than 150 people at the University.

Our route took us along the old airport highway, once bordered by a beautiful beach, now a dense forest of semi-legal apartments, houses, stores and auto workshops that sprang up when Shias from southern Lebanon poured into the capital, after the Israeli invasion in 1982.

A sprawling shantytown capable of keeping secrets: It’s widely believed that American, British, French and other western hostages passed, without notice or remark, through the labyrinthine back streets and alleyways of this urban jungle.

That wasn’t on my mind, however, as we pulled up yards away from what used to be the golden sands. My first impression was not of poverty, rather more of general abandonment. This was a world apart from the wealthy mansions on the mountains a few miles away, looking down – in every sense of the words – on this and other neighborhoods like it.

Within seconds of stepping from our vehicle, we were accosted by a man on scooter with a two-way radio. Who were we, what were we doing, he asked and we told him, CNN, here to cover the funeral. He politely asked us to wait and returned a few moments later with two burly men. Hezbollah security. They were controlling the funeral and we needed their permission to film. It was granted in an instant. It’s not always that easy. I later found out our chaperones were told we were “untouchable”-- that is, not matter how angry mourners got, we were not to be hassled. And they could not have been more diligent, keeping us ahead of the crowd, and those times when we slipped back, maneuvering us with ease through the tight packed arms and elbows in to the best position to shoot.

Hezbollah’s leadership had clearly decided it was in their interests to let journalists see the pain and suffering in their community. They had also quite clearly decided not to let us film the guns fired at the graveside. I couldn’t see them, but I could sure hear them and see the smoke rise over the gathered heads.

Hezbollah has a shrewd and tightly- controlled media operation, enough to put some
corporations and even governments we deal with to shame.

But if our access was managed, the emotions of the dead man’s family were not. His wife, pregnant with his unborn child, called for revenge. His brother, who had been carried by two men through the length of the wake collapsed, a shambles, no more a man, slumped legs dangling in to the freshly dug hole. He had to be taken away.

But this wasn’t the emotional trigger I had feared. What brought tears to the eyes of even the most embittered of onlookers was the dead man’s daughter. She could barely have been three. She came with her brother, perhaps all of five.

Her mother, sitting by the grave flailed about, wailing, the crowd echoed to get the children away. They stood what felt like an eternity looking at they knew not what. The hole, the crowd, their mother, the men holding them. I searched the girl’s eyes for a glimmer of understanding.

Only raw, red swelling, a mirror of her mother. Next to me, tears ran down a translator's face. In that instant shone every reason not to go to war.

As we moved away, out of the human press surrounding the grave, we came to a different part of the crowd. Their murmuring washed over me like a gentle wave and the intensity of the isolated graveside solitude receded.

It was then I realized that while most of the faces at the graveside were young, the faces of those here in this group were older. They’d seen it all before. Buried generations of brothers, fathers, sons and cousins before. Been through a civil war, knew what could come. It was the young who were at the grave side, it was the young who were lamenting the dead, it was the young simmering in the hatred of the other side that accompanies loss in this way.

If what is happening in Lebanon heralds the start of a wider conflict to come, as many fear, then a fresh cycle of it was forged here in this cemetery.

As large as several football fields, it is already a final accounting for many who’d left their homes in the south during the last civil war. As we exited the graveyard and turned up a tiny alley, we passed the victim’s brother, sitting on a green plastic chair outside a store, his feet resting on another chair.

Some color had returned to his face. As we walked on, I thought about how elsewhere in Lebanon that day, other young men were being buried, young men killed in the university clashes. More brothers, wives, mothers -- more children-- bereaved and bereft and not just where Hezbollah could open the door and put them on display, but from other traditions too.

Everyone loses. Hard not to conclude the seeds of the next conflict are being sown.

Covering the subtle twists and turns in Cuban politics is a bit like reading tea leaves.

It’s been six months since Fidel Castro handed power over to his younger brother Raul – in theory a temporary measure while he recovered from intestinal surgery. He hasn’t made a public appearance since then and we haven’t even had any photos or video of him since October.

At dinner with foreign journalists talk is all about Fidel, his health and the opaque world of Cuban politics. We are overnight experts on diverticulitis and peritonitis – conditions reportedly ailing Fidel. The 8-page daily Communist paper Granma has turned into a kind of oracle and we all comb through its pages seeking signs. Is a three-page spread on one of Fidel’s victory speeches an indication that the government already thinks of the ailing leader in past tense or a sign that he is still calling at least some of the shots?

Everyone has a reliable source who turns out to be wrong. This was one of the few weekends we weren’t woken out of our sleep because someone in Miami heard on a ham radio that el Comandante had died or started chemotherapy.

Fidel and what comes next also dominate conversations with Cubans. Many yearn for economic changes but worry they could bring crime and drugs and greater inequalities. Their fears and hopes are perhaps exacerbated by the lack of information.

The official media has no health updates or stories on where the government is going. Instead, this past week has been all about the 154th birthday of Jose Marti. The poet and patriot died during the fight for Cuba’s independence from Spain.

Fidel has always said he didn’t want to encourage a cult of the personality. He may be the only leader 70 percent of Cubans have ever known, but I have never seen a statue of him anywhere. Some see Marti as a kind of stand-in. Busts of the mustachioed freedom fighter are literally all over the island. Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day cards are inscribed with quotes from Marti.

As students and doctors and farmers across Cuba laid their wreaths at the base of Marti monuments this last week, I couldn’t help wondering what will happen the day Fidel goes. It’s easy to imagine bearded statues erected next to Marti and quotes from his lengthy speeches appearing on greeting cards. Easier than reading the political tea leaves.

From CNN Havana Producer Shasta Darlington.