Al-Qaeda-inspired militants stir up Lebanon

The San Francisco Chronicle
January 21, 2008
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/21/MNUIUID6S.DTL

By Hugh Macleod
Beirut

The attack on a US embassy vehicle that killed four people on 15 January just outside Beirut represents a dangerous widening of political violence in the country to include international targets, and shows that Al-Qaeda-inspired extremists are attempting to push the politically deadlocked country towards civil war, said analysts.

“Al-Qaeda is now unleashed in Lebanon and they are here to stay,” Ahmad Moussali, professor of political science and Islamic studies at the American University of Beirut, told The San Francisco Chronicle. “Al-Qaeda thrives in civil war and chaos. International players should be very careful in Lebanon.”

Lebanon has been without a president since 23 November with parliament unable to agree a successor to Emile Lahoud; the culmination of a year-long political crisis that has seen the Hezbollah-led opposition backed by Syria and Iran attempting to bring down the US-backed government.

Last Tuesday’s roadside bomb targeted a US embassy vehicle on a road regularly used by diplomats traveling to and from the US embassy. The explosion also injured 21 people, including one American citizen, but the US diplomats who were its presumed target escaped unharmed. FBI investigators began inspecting the blast site Thursday.

The explosion was the first such anti-American terrorism in Lebanon since nearly 300 Americans were killed in suicide truck bomb attacks against the embassy and the US Marine barracks near Beirut airport in 1983.

The US blames Hezbollah for those attacks, as well as for the kidnappings of dozens of foreigners during the 1980s — charges the Shiite militant group has always denied.

Far from being the work of Shiite Hezbollah, Beirut-based analysts saw last week’s attack as evidence of the continuing rise of Al-Qaeda-inspired Sunni extremists in this divided country, pressures they warn could push the domestic political crisis into armed confrontation.
On 10 January security forces arrested an alleged senior member of extremist group Fatah Islam in Tripoli’s Abu Samra neighbourhood, an area known as a stronghold of Sunni Islamist militancy.

Fatah Islam, whose members included dozens of Saudis and north Africans as well as Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians, lost a bloody 15-week battle against the army last summer in the northern Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared. The army arrested over 200 militants and says Fatah Islam is linked to Al-Qaeda.

The Tripoli arrest came three days after a broadcast by Fatah Islam’s fugitive leader Shaker Absi on a militant Web site in which he threatened to kill army General Michel Suleiman and his followers, accusing them of waging the Nahr al-Bared battle for political purposes, including appeasing the US.

General Suleiman has emerged as the consensus candidate for president. Last month General Francois Haj, the man tipped to take over Suleiman’s role as head of the army and the head of operations against Fatah Islam, was assassinated in another car bomb attack. It was the first attack on a high ranking army officer in decades.

UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon are also threatened by Sunni militants.

In a statement broadcast on 29 December, Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden criticized Hezbollah for agreeing to the deployment of the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) following the end of the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah fighters in August 2006. Bin Laden said the UN soldiers were on a mission to “protect the Jews”.

Analysts said that message would have been taken as a rallying call by Sunni militants in Lebanon.

“Bin Laden’s threats represent a kind of edict, guidelines which are adapted by groups that identify themselves with Al-Qaeda,” said Amal Saad Ghorayeb, an expert on Hezbollah at the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut.

Saad Ghorayeb compared the attack on the US embassy vehicle to an 8 January roadside bomb which exploded as two Irish UNIFIL soldiers drove through Rmaileh, 35 km south of Beirut, close to the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp, a hotbed for Sunni Islamist militant groups.

“Both were very clumsily planned and were not high value targets. It was an assassination attempt but not along the lines of previous assassinations,” she said, referring to a string of clinical assassinations of anti-Syrian figures in Lebanon since the 2005 killing of former premiere Rafik Hariri.

“It could well be an al-Qaeda inspired attack. There has been a resurgence of sorts. Fatah Islam were always clumsy.”

The recent attack on UNIFIL was the third attack on the 13,500-strong peacekeeping force since it was expanded in line with resolution 1701 that brought the 2006 July War between Israel and Hezbollah to an end.

Three Spanish and three Colombian UN soldiers were killed when a bomb destroyed their armoured troop carrier last June. A month later, a bomb exploded near a UNIFIL position, causing no casualties.

In an interview at the UNIFIL base in the southern port of Naqora, spokeswoman Yasmina Bouziane told The Chronicle that the peacekeepers would not be deterred by the threats against them.

“Security for UNIFIL is paramount. But we will not change our patrolling and have taken measures to mitigate attacks. [UNIFIL Commander] General Claudio Graziano recognises there are extremist groups who want to destabilise the south.”

With the failure of French-led international diplomacy and most recently an Arab League initiative to mediate in Beirut’s political crisis, analysts see security deteriorating further.

“The attack against the US embassy vehicle moves the whole Lebanon issue up a gear and makes it more of an international concern,” said AUB’s Moussali. “But domestically, it simply shows that now anything can be blown up. Unless we can find a political compromise fast we’re heading down the road to chaos.”