He also seized on a gaffe Mr. McCain made Tuesday in Amman, Jordan, when he confused the main sects of Islam and the support for each from Al Qaeda, a Sunni dominated group, and Iran, a majority Shiite nation.
The two main sects, Shia Zaidi and Sunni Shafi, have traditionally been seen as moderate with minimal differences.
Since then, the peace in Lebanon has depended on a delicate balance among the country's main sects: the Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians.
Islam has 2 main sects, which are Sunni and Shia.
There are two main sects in Islam, the Sunni and the Shi'ite.
There are two main sects within Islam: the Shiite/Shia and the Sunni.
In an orgy of killing in Baghdad and many other cities, the two main sects ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, expelling each other into a series of highly segregated enclaves.
The differentiation of the school into two main sects, later called akousmatikoi (from akousma, viz., the esoteric teachings) and mathēmatikoi (from mathēmatikos, "scientific"), may have occurred at that time.
Those attacks, the first in February of that year and the second in April, led to large-scale bloodletting and mass displacement across Iraq, pitching the two main sects of Islam against each other, just as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of a forerunner to Isis, had envisaged.
The group has assiduously worked to worsen the sectarian bitterness sweeping the region between Islam's two main sects.
